Roon Financial Stability / is Roon Labs LLC a “good investment”?

Agreed. I can see a case for making Lifetime an option exclusively available at the time of purchase of a new Nucleus/Nucleus+. Roon Labs might even lock the subscription to the hardware ID, making it non-transferable (limited to the lifetime of the device itself). Probably not worth the development effort for Roon Labs to do so, but I can see why Nucleus owners would prefer lifetime. The Nucleus becomes an expensive doorstop without an active subscription…

Because it’s built on commodity hardware, it doesn’t. Just run another OS…

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Remember it’s a well built and pretty looking fanless Intel NUC…

Plenty of potential uses.

Cheers !

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I suppose that’s technically true, but $2.5k for a 7th generation i7 NUC to use as a generic PC is pretty terrible value for money.

Essentially, my point was that the Nucleus does not make much sense without a Roon subscription. As such, a lifetime option that’s exclusive to Nucleus owners might make sense.

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But a it is your choice to buy a Nucleus or to buy a NUC and install ROCK. I consider a large part of the Nucleus offer is a service of convenience. Not a hardware purchase only. You are right that it is a high price when you do not want to subscribe to Roon. But the same applies sort of with printers or CDs. If you are not willing to buy CDs a CD player is a total waste. If you are not willing to buy toner, ink, your printer will be a waste.

Danny has said a little bit about Roon’s business in this thread:

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I recall seeing similar questions when I bought my lifetime subscription early in Roon’s development. I think I paid $500 minus a 10% discount. That investment was higher on risk and greater on potential reward at the time. It has now paid for itself. Although prices are higher today, the risk-reward equation is similar. Paying for a lifetime sub, assuming Roon stays in business (and I have no doubt it will), gets you a financial reward after a few years. If you want to shift that risk to “secure” without the potential financial gain, pay monthly or yearly.

Well… after a bunch of thinking, I decided to offer Roon some junk food and switch to a lifetime sub. I guess the recent threads have convinced me that:

  • Roon seems to have a leadership with reasonable financial discipline, or at least public statements that (assuming all true, which I’m accepting at face value) are in line with how I’d want a bootstrapped company to act
  • Roon, while slower on some strongly desired releases than some people feel is justified does seem to have a track record of shipping improvements that are fairly impressive given the scale of the team (there are a lot of 20-40 person companies that do not ship this much; given that this is a home-server based technology I’m fairly impressed)
  • the lifetime is likely going away
  • the monthly is likely to go up (this is my inference, but I think is a reasonable guess), so the “breakeven” is likely less than the 70 months currently
  • while I rate the likelihood that I’m still using Roon in 5 years at 50/50, if I’m a contributor to increasing that likelihood in even a small way, I’m happy to do it
  • as others have pointed out, if I feel like I’m “taking advantage” too much thru not contributing enough, I’m sure I can find a way to pay more
  • at the end of the day, I make other comparably sized financial gambles regularly, and I’m only overthinking this one because it is “equity-like” or at least has counterparty risk (though not really with upside, it’s more like I’m buying an annuity which pays in the delivery of a service that I both hope is a perpetuity and I hope that I continue to value the service)

So I’ve paid my money, and I’ll takes my chances. Thanks for all you’ve already done for me, Roon!

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Most likely outcome IMHO…I have 2 friends who by chance signed up for lifetime the day before the price jumped to $699

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In fact Roon have said they would like to reduce it. But don’t let that make you think you should have done something else. Lifetime is a good deal, good for you long term and good for Roon in the short term. Now you’ve made your choice sit back and enjoy.

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Insider trading.

AJ

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Once you’ve learned certain aspects of Roon, you can ‘pay back’ by helping new users get past their growing pains. This can help keep them happy, paying users.
A fringe benefit is that the more you try to help others here, the more you’ll really learn about Roon.

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I wonder what percentage of new users find their way to these forums / engage. It’s a great point helping out in the community as a way of giving back - but I’d hazard a guess that this kind of “hands-on” community is beyond a good portion of the addressable market. Your point is very well taken though.

-j

According to the Forum, there are around 37,000 people who have signed up for the forum. So less than 40% of the Roon subscribers. And clearly, the number of active Forum users is much lower than that.

About - Roon Labs Community

:astonished: 20 admins, and 17 mods?! No wonder this is such a nice place to hang out

Hehe… Admin/Mod status is bestowed upon Roon staff by default, so they don’t count. Beware of Kevin_test though — he’s just mean.

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There are also a number of “unofficial” Roon support groups on Facebook that give some decidedly questionable advice at times.

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Oh, I wouldn’t know about that - I refuse to use Facebook. Spawn of the devil. :wink:

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Some of the advice on here is decidedly questionable at times…

… but it usually sorts itself out in the end… :wink:

(And I’m going to have to go and look now… I can’t help myself… )

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I deleted my FB account 4 years ago and had them expunge my data, as well as my Instagram account (since it’s in the same data structure). Pain is non-trivial there - there are some people who just assume that I know something because they posted it on FB, and I certainly am a little bit less in-the-know about friends’ kids etc than I would be. But I have spent too much money on FB advertising and seen too many people’s views be changed to want to share my data with them. I’m more comfortable with the 2P data players, even though I don’t like them it’s a cost of being on the web given the actual nature of what they can see/accumulate. So there are a bunch of audio groups I don’t get to look at :frowning:

I like forums like this, SBAF, HF far better anyways - at least I think I do!

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