I would not buy lifetime if I were you, Roon has made local file listening much worse than it was (internet requirements, ui changes, search etc.). Go for monthly and see if it is good for you. I regret lifetime purchase because Roon changed a lot from that I invested.
Of course you can think differently and roon is really good for you.
Cheap or not, it’s less than what most people drop on a vacation without having to agonize over it for weeks in an online forum. And Roon even under Harman will certainly last longer
I hear that people actually spend that much for a night in a hotel…
I would not want anyone to think Roon is elitist. While many can’t afford $829, they can afford the monthly premium.
It’s a hard call for you.
I’ve started with Roon about 2,5 years ago. After the 14 day trial I’ve opted for a yearly subscription. I’ve renewed it. And late last year, halfway through my 2nd annual subscription, I’ve upgraded to lifetime for the then current price of 699 Euro.
I stream most of the time next to playing my own local collection of music. For me Roon lifetime equals about the cost of a single piece of hi-fi equipment. Cheaper even. My Cambridge CXA81 and CXNv2 for example are both quite a bit more expensive.
Even though I still have about 3,5 years to go before I break even on my lifetime investment, for me Roon has already paid itself back many times because I use it a lot and it handles all my music needs.
But for people like you it may be different. With the acquisition of Roon by Harman and the fact that you are only listening to your own local collection of music I would not advice you to go lifetime. Go monthly for a little while. See if Roon works for you and what the near future might bring. The latter being a guess for all of us.
A night in a hotel for a grand is not what most people do, but few hundred or a thousand for a vacation is as middle of the road as it gets
I said nothing about vacations or hotel rooms.
I thought you had replied to my post about the cost of a vacation but apparently it was to @shankha
I don’t think it is. People choose to spend 800 for all kinds of things all the time and in every other context than Roon nobody considers it an outrageous amount.
Hmmm…
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I said I would never call $829 extremely cheap. I did NOT say it was an outrageous amount. I’m done with this silly argument.
Well I didn’t. If I had pretended to quote you I would have used quote signs. Outrageous was my own word.
829 over 5 years is 13 per month, call that what you want. I’m sure most Roon users spend more on stuff without endless online discussions.
In the end, everyone’s own decision
I do listen to classical music and I like the Roon solution for the metadata! But I also listen to many other genres — as long as the music is great 
Right now I am revisiting Beatles, playing A Day in the Life 
You followed a very reasonable point about the relative value of money with an unnecessary, and I believe uncalled for, implication about @Suedkiez’s values. It’s not the worst personal attack we’ve seen around here but it is, nevertheless, a personal attack through implication. Neither necessary nor called for and almost certainly not based on any real knowledge of his personal values.
@jonasti - my thoughts on the topic…
You’re mostly hearing the lifetime crowd say “buy lifetime” and the non-lifetime crowd say “don’t buy lifetime”. That’s predicable 
Roon is amazing product. It’s different things to different people. I use it to create a merged view of my personal library and Qobuz. It’s fantastic for playback and discovery, it’s also fantastic for its ability to be extended and automated, which I take advantage of.
Roon is also an awful product. It can be challenging to set up and use. The company barely invests in any form of tech support and, while the community can often be helpful, it also has very real issues. Roon can have issues with networks. ARC is buggy and can be difficult to get working at all and, when it works, it isn’t hard to run into shortcomings and problems. Roon can take a very long time to look at and fix known bugs and they sometimes regress functionality in updates.
I love Roon. I don’t recommend to anyone I know, though. I’m not kidding about this - people come to my house, play around with it, say it’s awesome and want to know how to get it. I tell them not to bother. While I recommend and influence quite a number of people’s tech purchases and directions, I only recommend products that I’m confident people will be successful using and I feel accountable for anything I recommend. Roon is not a product I can feel accountable for.
So when you ask what you should do, that’s a hard question to answer
I bought a lifetime subscription a couple of years ago. I’m personally committed to Roon and don’t have a “plan B”. I’m a pretty competent user and there’s nothing else comparable. I like the “sunk cost” model where I pay a big chunk of money, and think in terms of recouping my investment over time. Then I’ll hit break even, then I’ll be in the “profit” zone. I can wait and if it doesn’t play out for some reason, that’s ok. I’ve made other worst investments.
You have the option of going from monthly to annual to lifetime (though I wouldn’t count on lifetime being available forever). If you can clearly see yourself using Roon a few years or more from now, then lifetime might make sense. It’s a big up-front expenditure but after that one payment, you’re done. That’s really nice. If you’re not sure about even a few years, then month to month is probably sensible until you figure it out.
Any way you go, though, remember that I didn’t recommend this thing to you. I don’t want you coming back to me and complaining when you run into the inevitable problems
We all value different things.
Annual is that which occurs once every year and as such is a synonym of ‘yearly’… You maybe wanted to use ‘perennial’ as in valid forever…
Thanks for catching this.
I would never pay for 5 years service of anything up front which is why I remain on annual sub.
This decision is not related to the Harman takeover.
I believe it depends of your personal situation and how much disposable income you have available. I’ve been a lifetime subscriber for 7.5 years, so it’s worked out as a good bet for me. There is some risk involved, but I don’t think Harman bought Roon to trash it….
Buying lifetime today is much less risk than it was back in 2015. Back then, Roon’s future was based on hope. Today you have a huge basis and the backing of a formidable HiFi company. $820 for life still sounds like a fair price to me. Roon’s future looks bright to me.