I find these arguments interesting partly because it is all relative, but also because it cuts across many of the more expensive hobbies. To me a $500 lifetime subscription is a great deal. I’ve got a lot invested in my audio equipment and $500 is on the low end of anything I own. Yet this, along with TIDAL, gives me access to a huge library of music, and without music, the rest of my setup would just be collecting dust. I don’t know how Roon does it. To keep a paid staff that works on updates and improvements and I’ve paid only $500 for life. I think it could be hard to keep the staff happy and the lights on.
Another expensive hobby is photography. Photographers complain all the time over the cost of the software they use to manage and edit their photos. But the software is a fraction of the cost of the camera and lens they own. If you don’t have a way to sort through, fine tune, and store those photos you have a lot of expensive equipment that does you little good.
One last example is bicycling. A quality new racing bicycle can cost easily $6,000 USD and that is the low end. Then there is the uniform, sunglasses, helmet and other gear that makes you look like a racer. Yet when it comes to training software for your smart trainer, everyone feels cheated if they pay more than $10 a month to keep access to the training package.
People into all these hobbies have money as all these hobbies are not cheap. But why is it that when it comes to software, everyone feels it is overpriced? It may be the nature of blogs and who tends to post on them and why. It could be most people feel Roon is priced right but more people who feel it cost too much tend to post.
Look at it this way, with a little luck, I’ll be using Roon for another 20 years. That works out to $2 a month. With TIDAL I save money not having to buy all the CDs I used to buy. Finding out about Roon was the greatest audio thing to happen to me since I bought my first turntable while in college. Roon is an amazingly great deal.