I remember those early discussions! 
Did you also understand that the lifetime option could disappear at any time with no warning?
I did, which is why I bought in early.
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Like some others, I was going to give myself a lifetime subscription as a Xmas present. I would have purchased before the price rise if I had been given warning. Roon makes no attempt to price for Australian subscribers taking into account our low dollar vs the US dollar – so the old USD $499 price was AUD $735, and the new USD $699 is AUD $ 1,030. This is a significant amount – for comparison, it feels to us Australians like USD $1,000 would feel to folks in the US. That is really tough to afford.
Of course Roon can make whatever commercial decisions it chooses to, but there is no getting around that it is treating existing customers poorly. In the end I believe such actions hurt a company rather than benefit them – and I have been in IT and software development for more than 30 years. No matter what the short term benefit, treat existing customers badly and it will end up costing you.
I have been so impressed with Roon thus far that I have been showing friends and recommending it – no more.
Roon could have handled this in a lot of different ways – and still could. It could, for example, have offered existing customers a 30 day window in which to convert their annual subscription to a subscribe to purchase – so each annual subscription over the next 4-5 years counted to a lifetime subscription at the old $499 price. So only customers who stuck with Roon for the next 4-5 years would get the lifetime subscription. In my view, this would balance the issues Danny raised with treating existing customers better. There are lots of variations on this theme that Roon could have offered.
Roon still could offer something like this – and I think it should.
I believer existing customers deserve better.
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That is almost completely automated in modern subscription services.
Just for the fun of it, let‘s leave away the unimportant words of that quote:
„customers is not what we want.“
Yes, customers are so pesky… they have their own ideas of what a good deal is.
Ignoring the importance of a successful customer relationship management is not sustainable. Roonlabs can be proud with what they achieved until now, but pride always goes before a fall.
Time will tell if customers are wrong or Roon’s management decision.
A happy customer will tell 10 others, disappointed customers will tell it to 100 others.
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Plus, as the business gets more subscribers, less of which are lifetime (junk food), costs of running the business should be diluted amongst the more subscribers. Hence the Annual price should be lower. And at some point, a monthly subscription can be explored.
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That’s the equivalent of a lifetime subscription on an installment plan and makes even less sense than what some others have suggested.
“I was planning to buy, but…”
It’s a much repeated refrain, but there’s no way to prove that and hence no reason for a rational seller to take that into account.
Probably proprietary, but if Roon could provide a figure on how many annual subscribers bought themselves lifetime subscriptions as “Christmas presents” last year, it might prove illuminating.
Estimates of 50% of existing annual subscribers being pissed off seem very overblown to me.
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If I have until April 2020 on my annual Subscription and I cancel my subscription today, will I still have access until April?
Thanks
Before roon… I play with JRiver and Daphile.
Play with roon rock and Ropieee on USBBridge Sig.
I have Roon now a couple of weeks and testing audirvana.
Only Roon is so much better as the other programs, that I now buy the lifetime membership.
I love roon 
it’s the best for music lovers 
Ben 
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Sure. It would be no different than just not renewing then. You’ve paid for a year either way.
But this is what you wrote “…for software that is an album sorting wizard, but has poor sound quality.”
Said enough?
There has never been a subscribe to purchase option. How would you ensure the subscriber renews under the subscribe to renew option?
Ultimately, Roon is going to drop or further limit the lifetime subscription.
Actually MCM it makes good sense.
I’ve been lucky enough to work for a number of firms that were very customer focused. We modeled the impacts of different pricing, campaigns, brand events on customer acquisition, retention, rolloff etc. I would guess Roon does something similar.
The standard measure used to understand profit impact on customer segments was always the net present value of estimated future discounted customer cash flows. Used everywhere.
Only Danny would know average customer lifetimes, failure to resubscribe rates, the discount rate used by Roon to place a lower value on cash flows further in the future etc.
But I would guess that the discounted cash flows generated by a scheme like the one I suggested, that tied customers in for 4 - 5 years and allowed for increases in annual subscriptions along the way, would not be so different to the discounted cash flows from the average subscription customer for the average period they remained a customer.
And what difference there was would be money well spent on maintaining satisfaction and loyalty of existing customers – instead of making a significant proportion of them feel bad about Roon.
To be clear – I am not suggesting that Roon adopt a subscribe to purchase option as an ongoing model; only as a one-off to existing customers for the current event: a window of 30 days in which they can elect to have the next 4-5 years of annual subscriptions go to purchasing the $499 lifetime. If they don’t renew every year, they forfeit the opportunity.
How does that model Danny?
So are Roon suggesting that if they got a surge of lifetime subscribers now, from existing annual subscribers they would be unable to mange that from a financial perspective? If they are then that’s quite telling in regard to how stable they are currently.
And before you all jump in to defend them and rip my post to bits, I said “are Roon suggesting”, I didn’t say they were.
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I thought by the 50th post that everything that could be said would have been said.
But now we’re up to 210 posts and counting. So let’s go over one more time why you’re upset or not.
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Let’s talk about MQA instead 
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One can mute the thread if it’s really that bad. But I totally get a person’s need to vent.
If there are 100,000 Roon Users with 20,000 Forum people, even 2% is 400 posts. It could be a while.
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I find it interesting what people complain about. Sarcasm was the intent of my post. The price increase complaints are not yet to the volume of Catalina postings, but are moving in that direction.
Venting is an pleasant way of putting it.
Forum members are over 25K now. Surprised there are not more with 100k members since this is the service portal.
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Yes a chance to buy before the price increase would have been nice, I’m about 18 months in and have just finished converting by airplay multi room system to bluesound, 2xpulse mini 2is and 2xblues cards for my NAD amps all to run with Tidal inside Roon.
My budget was kinda blown but I’d have leapt at 500 bucks if I’d have known there was a definate deadline. Now I’m just looking long and hard at how Tidal and Amazon HD operate in the Bluesound app.
I feel Roon have pulled a bit of a trick, if you where thinking about buying you better do it fast and they score an extra 200 bucks on the deal. I am sure there’s been more than a few, I may even turn out to be one of them
But the whole thing does leave a bit of a sour taste.
James
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