No. It entitles new buyer to nothing. Old and new buyers together would be notified or not notified all the same. Those who bought Nucleus that include a year of Roon would not be treated any differently.
Most users never go for the lifetime license, and even fewer since we raised the price of the lifetime.
Annuals are not “rent to own”. They never have been. We used to refund unused months of your annuals at the price you paid / 12 * number of unused months, but we haven’t done that in years.
If you want a lifetime license, the price is what it is today. I can assure you it will go up someday, maybe without notice. We already raised that price a couple of years ago, without notice, and we may do it again. We are giving you no assurances about future pricing. I wrote at length about our feelings on lifetimes here:
I never understood this line of thinking… Since when is the Canadian Dollar the same as the US Dollar? The exchange rate is the value difference. I don’t want CAD. I don’t pay all my bills in CAD. Even when I do pay in CAD, I pay more CAD than I would USD.
If a person were to buy a coffee for X CAD, then that person would use less USD to buy a comparable coffee, and even fewer to buy it with EUR. UK must be getting a great deal because the comparable coffee costs the fewest GBP!
The person isn’t getting stung any more or less. The currency just doesn’t have the same value, thus the exchange rate.
So, why do we include the year for free? For Nucleus customers that are new to Roon, it reduces friction at the start of the relationship. The margin from the Nucleus covers our costs, and it’s just a thing to make the experience smoother for a large subset of Nucleus buyers. We find most people who have lifetime usually end up gifting the free annual to someone they think would love Roon, which is another way to inject joy into your own life as well as someone else’s.