For what it's worth, IDA now comes in an IDA Home version [1, 2]. It is a one year subscription for 365 USD (single arch) and is cloud tethered for at least the decompilers. I no longer have access to IDA Pro via my university, so I am now using Ghidra. I can recommend newcomers to take a look at it or other tools (e.g. binary ninja), if you are not locked into your IDA workflow.

For me IDA Home seems to lack at least one key feature we needed back then: customizable CPU plugins. We had to extend one with a newer version of the instruction set. On top of that, that CPU type is not even available via Home. Also no RISC-V support (yet?).

On another note: the whole cloud based concept for a disassembler/decompiler with debug support sounds like a recipe for disaster. One wrong key press and you might run malware on an internet connected system. Even when only disassembling, I am tempted to run everything in an offline VM to defend against bugs in the disassembler.

[1] https://hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi/products [2] https://hex-rays.com/ida-home/