What happens with the lifetime subscribers if the company folds or is sold?

Considering streaming will be around for a long long time you really can’t go wrong… I actually find it more likely that Roon will abandon the lifetime option sometime in the future - as it would certainly bring more Money to the company… or - to put it the other way - lifetime subscription really is a bargain when u look at it on the long run…

… so now - with the information we already have - I would be more worried about not having pulled the trigger on the lifetime subscription while it was still available :wink:

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This is interesting. Since I once asked prior making up my mind about which license to go for.
My knowledge till now is …roon does work as long as the core gets informed from roon’s license server that the account got a valid license.
This will be impossible if there’s no license server, or if a non-lifetime-licence timed out.
Would be nice if someone from @support could give a clear statement, since it’ll be a MAJOR argument for or against a lifetime license.

A clear statement has been given. It is in this very thread.

And:

These statements were made back in October 2015 and nothing has changed as far as we know. On the basis of that I went for lifetime part of the way through my first year.

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@StefanB – see above at @Henry_McLeod’s post.

@danny :wink: my advice is then to put this into https://roonlabs.com/pricing.html since it’s not obvious at all to upcoming/new users. Not to me in fact.

It’s pretty common that if you subscribe to a service it’ll last until the service provider will be gone (no matter what might have ever caused this). Had this way to often in the past.

From your lines I get it’ll end up similar to MusicIP which became reduced in functionality since their servers quit down, but the software on it’S own remained full functional locally with the foreseable limitations.

Think I’ll put the ‘upgrade for a lifetime license’ on my wishlist 4 santa then
(wife being my personal santa, haha)

thanks a lot for getting this explained …

Which begs the question, when Roon goes out of business will the software still work?

All the metadata and other features? Not being open source means it can’t live on like LMS/Squeezelite.

There is a statement on what happens if Roon closes. They would close the need for internet connection and Roon would work as is disconnected.

You can also export some of the metadata in Roon to your files

Hi,

I’ve merged your post into the existing topic.
See Danny’s post higher up in this topic.

What happens to Roon lifetime subscribers if

  • Apple folds ?
  • Microsoft folds ?
  • Linux folds
  • Intel folds
  • Ben Folds folds?

Can Danny et al ensure us that Roon will still work on iPad’s, and PCs if this happens?

If not the least I think Roon should do is give free lifetime membership to everyone on the forum with a moan quotient of 1.76325 or below.

image

where v is the average amount of words per post, F is the amount of times the words bug, folder support or UPnP are mentioned. M is the ratio of positive to negative comments in a members posts, and L is the 1/emojis used per post.

.sjb

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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: I have stopped posting on this forum because

2 posts were split to a new topic: I have stopped posting on this forum because

Assuming Roon would indeed close its doors at some point (every company will come to its end at some day), what would happen to those Roon installations that run on a lifetime membership? Would they continue to work?

Not if they shut down their servers. It might work to play your local content without any metadata, etc. IDK. However, if you used Roon for 4 years before that happened, you got your money’s worth. I wouldn’t worry about it.

Unlike ‘open source’ products, when/if Roon goes belly-up all related content will likely stop working.

For-profit = all work needs to be budgeted so something as small as correcting a typo would have a cost associated with it and if it’s not in the budget then it just won’t get fixed. It also means the product will likely lag behind improvements depending on how much the company wants to ‘gamble’ on the value-added benefit of the improvement. This is to say…improving X will only be worth it if it attracts new customers. So all these folks who own Roon begging and pleading for something mean very little if it does not attract new customers who see the value.

Open-source projects, on the other hand, churn out updates and improvements at a head-spinning rate and can live on no matter what happens. However, they have their downside too, like being unstable and devs who are stuck on a new-feature tread mill.

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Roon for Life or Die!

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Actually, it isn’t that much of a choice. The latter is an unavoidable given. :slightly_frowning_face:
I like the attitude though!

@danny,

Thank you for your detailed explanation [about the price increase of lifetime]. May I ask you a question on a tangentially related point?

I’m a lifetime subscriber already and am very happy with the product in general. However I recently became very much aware of the software’s dependence on ‘Roon central’ when ‘something happened’ over the weekend that broke Roon’s connection to Tidal and Qobuz. This in turn raised the question of what I would be left with in the (I hope very unlikely) event that Roon were to fold. Would it just be the library management component of the software?

Aidan

I’ve @Aidan_Gaule,

I merged your post into the existing topic, see Danny’s post higher up …

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Understood. Thanks again.

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