- Yes (lifetime)
- No (annual)
0 voters
Lifetime still worth it with the price it is now?
Any cause for concern long term? 
If the price of a perpetual licence has you thinking twice and it’s an amount you’d miss, get a year, try it out seriously for 3-6 months and stick with it if you find it beneficial.
If the financial investment is concerning Roon like most things in life can be missed without harming your music enjoyment significantly, it’s a tool to aid convenience and the enjoyment of discovery of new music.
Bare in mind as well that Roon has been around for some time albeit by other names/guises as it was previously Sooloos which itself had it’s beginnings back in the early naughties and ran its course via Merdian towards its end an ultimate evolution in to Roon in 2015. It’s a lean business with a low employee count and no expensive operational overheads, they all “work from home” ironically.
I’m of a mind to pay annually and support its growth as has been a similar case with Audirvana, which I use a lot less these days but still pay occasionally to update as it’s basically one guy and a well meaning community supporting it, Roon is along those line just on a slightly larger scale.
Most things done well come at a price.
3 Likes
It’s horses for courses really. I am not a huge fan of direct debits and knowing once you have it, that’s it over and done with. 5 years is still relatively young for a company and they don’t really have any direct competition yet.
The more the number of people that get lifetime, the higher the likelihood they go under soon. You’ve got bills to pay every year. So do they. The CEO had a blog post at some point where he went into detail about the reasons he was more interested in yearly revenues than a one time hit.
1 Like
Simple solution to fear of self repeating payments, especially annual ones is to put an event in your calendar of choice a week before it’s due to renew and then either cancel it or let it roll on again.
They will email you leading upto renewal.
The ones I’m somewhat lax on are Apple Music and Spotify but my family insist on keeping them despite almost everything they offer being available
on other services.
I’d let them go before I let Roon go anyway.
Good luck with the decision anyway, I was very skeptical for a long time but once I’d used it for a few months I knew it would be staying.
That’s the thing, is it the type of software in your opinion that once you start using it properly, and it manages everything that most users would be reluctant to leave as it would be very difficult to organise everything without it?
I totally agree from a business perspective lifetime subscriptions is not good business practice at all and can’t understand why they are still offering it.
It’s a database and visual front end to an existing local library primarily and over time that’s been consolidated to present a single point of view across multiple sources namely Qobuz and Tidal which I have the maxed out subscriptions on both platforms.
It’s doing a decent job of managing the metadata and making navigating your own library more cohesive, I use the focus feature a fair bit for example to narrow down the choices based on specific criteria but I also find myself more and more setting the mood with an initial choice and letting Roon calculate an extended listening journey for me with the Radio feature, I’ve discovered some great material that way I’d probably never have found by other means or certainly not as easily.
If I uninstalled Roon tomorrow everything would still work but I’d need to go back to endless swapping back and forth between half a dozen apps and those apps are not “connected” or sharing benefits between each other. I find this to an extent when I listen in the car and have to open up specific apps like Qobuz to “get back to where I came from” musically speaking.
Roon cloud/remote that works via Carplay or Android Auto would be appreciated thinking about it.
4 Likes
They are offering as a legacy thing. They needed it when they started as away to get more income in fast to build the product. They offered a good discount on it at the start for early adopters to, but it’s now becoming a heavy weight around their neck. They will phase it out for new customers sooner rather than later I bet, but for those that bought in they will still be fully supported the same as any other subscriber
It’s funny people are proud to have bought the lifetime license and some feel Roon owes them for this and shout it out when they have a support issue, personally it’s doing more harm than a benefit to the company but its a testament to good product that people have done it on the first place. When they do get rid of it I would expect a change in pricing structure and offering monthly and yearly subs.
There are no certainties in any business or product you always buy in expecting it will be there for ever, but not everything is. This goes for hardware as well as software. I buy stuff for what it is at the time, not what it might be or not. If it continues to grow and evolve great, but If it did go away you still have your music and subs to other services, you will just have to use something else to gather them all. I would be very sad but I am sure with more and more Roon partners popping up and more kit being Roon Ready it has a good future. Obviously Naim saw the prospects of adding it quite early on to their new products and the way music consumption is changing and what people want from it. It costs them time and resources to become a Roon partner and Roon ready so I doubt they would invest in a fly by night.
1 Like
Depends how long you think you’re going to live… 
Or what the lifetime of Roon may be? 
2 Likes
My year was coming to an end - just pulled the trigger on a lifetime. With my luck, they’ll go under in the next couple of years.
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They won’t! It just gets better and better albeit updates are slower than previously.
They’ll go under.
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