I’ve no idea what the cost is since the company pays for it — I do need the horsepower to run some really large models and I suspect most people don’t need this kind of spec. But for my company it’s just part of the cost of doing business.
There’s no IT and I can provision instances of any type (subject to limits) at any time.
VSCode is free if you self-host it. There are corporate tiers with virtual desktops etc, and you can pay for services as GitHub pilot if you want.
Anyhow there a wealth of free extensions to customize it and the setup is really straightforward. I have version management git in a private GitHub project for version management. You can add extensions for rendering graphs in good quality and importing and exporting stuff is easy.
I have not been able to figure out why some people prefer to use Jupiter notebook as it is.
There’s no IT and I can provision instances of any type (subject to limits) at any time.