I emailed Roon to request they re-activate my old account so I can try their new features. They kindly obliged with a 14 day free trial but failed to inform me or make it clear that after 14 days I would be auto charged using the card details they previously stored on their systems.
The day I was charged I contacted Roon to explain the account and free trail were completely unused (I didn’t get around to trying it) and requested they cancel and refund my account.
They ignored my email. I sent another email requesting the same. They ignored my second email. They have now to date ignored all my emails and also do not respond when I use their online contact form.
I requested they remove my card details from their systems. No response.
For over a week now they have ignored all contact.
This is not the behaviour of a reputable and trustworthy company.
For what it’s worth I felt previously that their software interface and reliability was pretty good and never had a problem with their customer service until now.
The reason I previously didn’t commit or purchase Roon is because I did not perceive any uplift or difference in sound quality when compared to other free players such as iTunes for bit perfect playback at CD quality (16bit 44khz).
My experience with Roon is that they are very accommodating and helpful. I suggest you put in a support request on their forum, where they usually reply promptly.
They hide such posts in part to preserve the privacy of the customer. They don’t want messages back such as “your credit card was declined” to be viewable by the public. Any company with thousands of customers can have a glitch like this; they are not per se evil or untrustworthy. Their business strategy is not to make money by charging customers who don’t want their service.
My experience with Roon has been pretty good, though I’m not sure their approcah isn’t changing with the changes to lifetime subscriptions, but that’s the way of things.
From memory I signed up to a 30 day trial, liked it, and got charged for the annual subscription the day I killed my MBP Roon Core by knocking a glass of wine over it a few Christmases ago - I emailed them, explained the situation and had a refund without any quibbles.
They were very obliging and said I could have another free trial when I’d sorted out the computer problems before committing. Great customer service convinced me to subscribe again.
I hope they do the right thing and refund your charges.
It seems clear that you didn’t abide by the agreement. I suggest that you go through the cancellation procedure on their website. I presume that you are only down a one-month subscription at this stage, but you need to cancel via their system to avoid that becoming two.
As to sound quality, while Roon does offer opportunities to ‘shape’ sound, it is offered primarily as the best way to curate your collection, and many, including me, believe that it achieves this.
There was no agreement, they had no authorisation to charge my card on this occasion.
I have already cancelled the subscription myself using their website.
My primary concern is that I’ve had zero response from Roon after over a week of requesting the cancellation and refund. That’s not good and doesn’t tally with my previous experiences with Roon.
Sorry, I made some assumptions about how it worked. I see now that the deal is that they charge you for a year ($119), once the free trial (14 days) is up. (So not just a month, but I think it’s always been like this.)
But the point is that you asked them to ‘re-activate’ your account, which would obviously require you to give them Credit Card details if they didn’t already have them
Your mistake was not to make the decision to quit within 14 days after asking them to re-actívate. Seems to me that you are at their mercy, but as many have observed here, they are usually reasonable, but not under any obligation.
Sounds unlike the Roon I know if all is as portrayed here.
I’m sure it will be sorted to your satisfaction and do let us know when it is.
Actually I think they do a 30 day money back or cooling off period so you should be fine. I think we all seem to think of Roon as a huge company whereas they might have an accounts dept. of 2 with one on holidays and the other in hospital as his wife gives birth.
Excellent, I really believe you just got them on a bad day. As I said above they have a no quibble 30 day refund, which is what you’ve just availed of.
Their website seems to be clearly misleading on this:
Your payment information (credit card details) is transmitted securely to our payment processor (Stripe) when you enter it and isn’t stored in our systems
You get the impression they dont store card info. But they let Stripe do it for them?
I know, I know I’m a Roon fanboy and apologist but FFS this is just telling you that Roon don’t hold your credit card details but use Stripe’s (more secure) servers.
They have a no quibble 30 day refund policy, I cannot think of anything less misleading.
They did the right thing, and that means a lot - hopefully if you feel Roon would be a benefit to you in the future you’ll give them another crack of the whip!
I think it’s also reassuring that you updated us with this outcome many of us expected, and reaffirms our views that they’re a decent outfit (even if I don’t agree with some software reconfigurations they’ve made).