To me, it’s an easy decision…Do you really like Roon and it works for you? Do you intend to stay with Roon for 4 or 5 years, maybe more? Can you afford a one time expenditure of $700 here at Christmas (Hanukkah) time? If the answer to ALL of these is yes, go for it. If the answer to any of these is no, stick with annual.
The break-even is 4.7 years if you pay $700 to avoid annual at $150. If you wait for the price to go up to $830, the break-even is 5.5 years.
I do complain about what I don’t like. But Roon is inescapable to me now.
I am a lifetime subscriber since July 2015. And don’t regret it. And today I would make the same commitment.
you must have missed the emails (spam folder?)
additionally, our website https://roonlabs.com/pricing notes the current and new pricing in a quite absurdly banana-colored panel that can’t be missed.
It’s frustrating that you missed this news… we really tried to make sure no one missed it, to avoid the perceived unfairness of the last price increase.
In the post here announcing it, you can see what we learned about what the user expectations were and what we’ve did this time to address them:
This caught my attention. I am curious as to what you concern is exactly? As a recent subscriber, I am largely ignorant of how Roon works. Could you explain what is you are worried about?
With the price increase on the horizon I would love to take out a lifetime subscription, but with the current cost of living crisis here in the UK (and I presume it’s the same in most other countries in Europe, and also the US?), Christmas on the horizon etc etc I just cannot stretch to it just now. Correct me if I am wrong, but we need to pay with our credit or debit cards and cannot use Paypal to pay for subscription, the way some music subscription sites such as Qobuz allow us to do? Speaking personally if we could pay with Paypal I would probably fork out the current price of £570 for lifetime, and use Paypal’s “Pay over 3 month” option. Is there a reason Roon do not use Paypal, even if just for larger outlays like Annual or Lifetime?
Just ask @beka (She studied at Hogwarts, I think 
).
She set me up with PayPal, for a lifetime license.
Agree, if you contact Roon accounts and request payment by PayPal they generate an invoice on your PayPal account and then you have access to the instalment PayPal options to choose with your payment.
Room 2.0 requires internet access
Just worth noting if you’re UK/Europe based and paying by PayPal the exchange rate may be higher than your credit cards… where can-i-find-paypal's-currency-exchange-rates
It was higher, even through my bank it was over £50 LESS than using Paypal.
Even though I can happily drop that cash, I do find PayPal easier to just spread the cost. But, if you have a bank that has a good rate and does free fee transfers worldwide, it is cheaper for us in the UK.
Yes, I didn’t think that one through. It’s still marginal to the core issue, though.
Something like Wise (formerly TransferWise), will give better exchange rates. Wise has both physical and virtual debit cards, which you can then associate with PayPal.
My mistake. I didn’t miss them. I just forgot about them because I expect incremental price increases over the years and wasn’t paying much attention. What has changed is the realisation that search in 2.0 is completely broken for a library my size with a lot of box sets. Its not yet critical path for me as I can mostly get by with the composition browser and various album filters and tags. But I am now very price sensitive incase functionality other than search starts to break.
I had the impression you can do that
Don’t credit card companies outside of Amerika offer cards with 12 or 18 months of interest free purchases? I guess not.
My credit rating is over 800 and I am constantly bombarded with mail offering interest free deals. I sign up for the card and then drop it once the interest free period runs out. I’ve been making large purchases using this method for 20 years and have yet to pay interest.
Is this just an Amerikan banking thing?
I have had credit cards for years, and I’ve never been bombarded with those kind of deal offerings. Has to be an American thing. I’m Dutch btw, from the Netherlands.
There has been a recent announcement by roon of architectural changes that will involve migrating functionality from locally managed cores to centrally managed cloud servers. Search is one of the first to be migrated but there will likely be others. I do not know the plans.
There are a handful of roon subscribers with large local libraries with several large box sets for whom search became really broken in 2.0. This is being addressed now and hopefully there will be fixes in upcoming releases. You can read about it here.
All I was trying to say was that prior to this incident I was leaning towards lifetime in the New Year. Now that makes no sense as I don’t know what other functionality will break over the next year in libraries like mine (or even can it be fixed) as roon executes its architectural plans. So in all likelihood I will just subscribe for another year. This need not concern you very much unless you have a similar library.
I use credit cards for almost everything. I have three really good cash back cards and pay them off every month. Never paid any credit card interest. I have my PayPal account linked to one of them, NOT my checking account. I use PayPal when I can just so I’m not spreading my credit card numbers across the internet.
Yep. exactly my strategies also. Great minds run in the same channels. 
Didn’t you manage to get this on the path to an upcoming fix in the other thread?
Edit: Saw the later post 
Yes, I was surprised roon jumped on this so quickly but very grateful they did.
But you can see what my concerns are about internet access. I know several do but I personally have no issues with a requirement for always on internet.
My concern is different. It has more to do with the general strategy of migrating the codebase from core to cloud. This incident with search seems to be on the way to a resolution but I might not be so lucky next time. So in the context of this thread any decisions about annual vs. lifetime are “wait and see” from my perspective.