Well, the inital releases of 1.6 wasn’t a success in my book… Roon went from a quick, beautiful Porsche with built in navigation to a old tarted up, high maintenance, Chevy with poor acceleration and a torn map in the front seat… (Well, the Chevy took us to France though) 
Yah I remember you had issues.
The funny thing is about 1.6, it was our most successful update by far. We had more daily trialers than ever before, significantly higher conversion rate (more annual signups), and the number of lifetimes was so high that we decided it might be a problem with 1.7 (thus the price increase).
Looking at the whole user-base, it was our most successful release. Crazy eh? Anyone that lived on community for the month after would never guess that.
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interesting… can I ask why?
Simple, i like the idea of being self sufficient. I’m an old fart (51 actually) and dont like renting things that i find valuable, like music (as i said, i tend to buy most of my favrites from Qobuz) Likewise, i bought Lifetime early in my second annual period with Roon and liked very much what i saw at the time. When Qobuz came in along with Tidal and we all experienced the slow searches and in my case, very long times for logging on to a core which previously had been logged out of my Roon account. (This issue still exist btw). What i’m saying here is that i am a bit worried that all the good stuff that Roon does for my music listening is getting more and more dependent on internet access and cloudbased search etc.
And thanks for listening and discussing all of these differing opinions!
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I’d just checked dates of my trial and subscription. It took me exactly three days of trial to decide and buy 499$ lifetime. Why some people need months or years?
If there was no lifetime option there is high probability I’d use different software like Plex or other. Yes, I’m lifetime Plex pass user. I really, really don’t like subscriptions.
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do you use tidal/qobuz?
With respect, this may be the root of the problem, as I see it. It’s been in your mind for so long that you have taken it for granted that it has been in everyone’s mind and that anyone not anticipating such a thing only has themselves to blame.
Would you have killed it outright without letting anyone know? If imagine not as it would make a mockery of " Don’t worry, you can always convert to a Lifetime Membership". Yet you’ve said above that the aim of such a significant price increase is effectively the same (to kill it off) and elsewhere that as it turns out maybe you should have raised it even more. Technically, raising the price to such an extent (and with such an intent) without warning isn’t technically breaking the ‘you can always convert to Lifetime’ promise (it still wouldn’t be even if you increased the Lifetime price to ten million dollars), but it can’t be said to be keeping the spirit of it.
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I’m a lifer…I’d definitely pay subscription fees for a room correction solution, just to bring something up that you mentioned hypothetically. Currently I use an Anthem with its built-in room correction, but I’d love to have more flexibility to consider other devices because I can’t go back to uncorrected systems.
I like the idea and would support it with a little extra on top of my lifetime.
Regards
Tom
I’m coming to the end of my thrid year of annual membership. I thought about changing to lifetime last year but the news about Tidal and its financial problems put me off. Streaming integration is essential to me.
Now that Qobuz is available and Tidal is still going I planned to upgrade to lifetime when my current sub finished.
$699 is a bit much for me so I’ll stick to annual. It’s disappointing but I’m not losing sleep over it. There are more important things to worry about. If Roon goes bust I’ll go back to Spotify and JRiver.
@Fengoon … wow. 718th post, and this is the first one that’s got me thinking we screwed up a bit.
Let me stew on this and discuss it with the rest of the team.
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ads in paid software? that’s obscene.
in-app sales of hardware? that’d be jumping the shark.
That said, there are non-in-app ways of doing both, also a way to do both in-app but not for paid customers.
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I wrote this a ways back. That the possibility and the allure of a lifetime upgrade helps sell the annual even if a customer never actually takes advantage of the lifetime. Not sure how eliminating the lifetime will affect that long term annual/ lifetime relationship.
The current rush on the $699 is out of concern the lifetime will end soon. Not sure it will be sustained.
I’m not a software marketing and business expert by any means and thus cannot with any level of wisdom suggest what you ought to do.
I do like the idea of better room correction integration. I’m content with the current hqplayer arrangement as Jussi is a workhorse and would not want to slow his update flow down. And Jussi needs to be paid, so not sure how a financial integration of Roon and hqplayer would benefit us beyond one click purchasing.
Did I just read a glimmer of hope??? That would be such a huge gesture of good will during this season.
I suspect the glimmer you think you see is that @Danny is stewing about just completely killing lifetime without warning because of the “Don’t worry, you can always convert to a Lifetime Membership”… Then again, they could just remove that phrasing completely and then kill lifetime - with or without a heads-up.
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You are on point.
I feel like the screw up was the fact that people are thinking about this message as a contract between us and them about future pricing. The T&Cs did not contain mention of this, nor was it our intention that people would read pricing into this message. Prices change. Would they expect to pay $499 if we had lowered the price? Of course not.
The more accurate statement would have been “Don’t worry, during trial you can always choose to shorten your trial and purchase and during an annual, unused months can also be applied towards a new purchase. New purchases will be conducted with the terms that come with the purchase at the time of the purchase.”
Alas, marketing text isn’t always so specific.
Now, we have to decide is what to do about that message since people are reading into it incorrectly.
When we kill lifetime, I will most likely need to write a similar post to the one at the top of this topic, and in it, I will need to clarify this message.
The thing about giving notice is that it wont help. Many will not get the message in the notice period and complain. Probably a similar number to who are complaining now.
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If Roon lowers the annual subscription price, will I get time added to my lifetime membership?
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Yes, along with years added to your life.
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I think something yet more clear would’ve help mitigate the $699 angst. To the effect of “the $499 lifetime fee may increase at anytime. Purchasing an annual license does not lock you in at the $499 price.”
I think you are correct, many saw the annual as locking them in for the $499 upgrade, if not in letter, then in spirit. Few read the T/C, thus major points are best communicated clearly and succinctly in other ways. This is not a legal case dependent upon contractual verbiage buried in T/C’s, it’s more about emotional perception. Hopefully a better strategy can be developed going forward.