Whereas I generally agree that Hardware technology products tend to get cheaper over time (though over the past couple of years this has not been true for high end graphics cards and motherboards for new chip-sets required by the latest high end CPUs which have become very expensive), disagree that Software gets cheaper. Very often Software is where the reals costs of a system are.
Software requires people to develop, test and maintain; and people are expensive. Complex software takes 1000’s of man hours to produce, and people costs generally increase over time.
I can foresee some instances in the future where the hardware is given away for free and the software required to run that hardware is charged for and provides the income.
Your last point is an interesting observation. I tend to agree and wonder how companies like Apple, where the reality is essentially the other way around, will fare in such a future.
Personally, I find it insulting that the lifetime price increased for us “long timer” annual people, with no chance for a “buy before it goes up”, while new folks had the opportunity to buy at the lower price (as I understand it).
I find Roon to be buggy, in my systems with my use cases (integration with iTunes mostly). Plus lacks some feature I’ve asked for over a year or more (searching showing the “loved” heart so I can see which matches are the ones I’ve selected as the best, for example).
The alternative to me is going back to syncing my iTunes library to my living room system, and using iTunes + tidal on my two listening systems.
Roon’s yearly price + feature set + playback quality makes it slightly better for me than the alternative, so I’m staying around. But the price increase means I’ll keep an eye open for better alternatives…
How do you figure you’ve had any less opportunity than folk that have just signed up for a trial? After the initial demo time period you’ve had to make a decision and you’d made yours, with months or years to rethink it. Someone that’s just entered a trial period has not had the opportunity to evaluate the software or time-frame you had at your disposal to make a different decision.
Your logic here makes no sense. You’ve not experienced a price increase at all, what you’ve experienced is the loss of an opportunity to avail yourself of a lifetime license at given price-point. The same opportunity you’ve had since the day you started your Roon trial and chose against (possibly even repeatedly). Roon still costs you exactly what it did before your option to purchase lifetime at the original price-point was removed.
Ah, the fallacy of the false dilemma - there are more than 2 options here. Roon could have announced an increase coming, so those that have paid the Roon bills so far would not be treated worse than people who never spent any $ with Roon.
And it’s not a one-time decision. Every year I can decide whether to do the annual or lifetime. Every year I consider how good Roon is vs. how much it costs for another year, or a lifetime, and so far every year I’ve decided it’s not good enough to do lifetime but it is good enough to do another year of. If I’d had warning that the lifetime cost was going up it might have made me choose lifetime at the lower cost. Or maybe not. But no option…
You logic makes no sense. Every year you’re a subscriber you reset the spend (other than the credit Roon would give you based on remaining term of a subscription license), so for all intents and purposes every year you delay and reconsider you’ve added $119 less remaining subscription to the cost of a lifetime license versus a year 0 acquisition for $499. Additionally, the only reason it’s a one-time decision is because you don’t give it any thought till the renewal comes around or an external shock such as a hike in the lifetime price is introduced. There is no false dilemma here, Roon doesn’t feature in the decision making, they only set the parameters within which the customer has to make a decison. You had two alternatives, you chose an annual subscription rather than a one-off payment for a lifetime license.
You have not been treated worse, you’ve had a lot more time to make a decision to acquire the same benefit (on more favourable terms) as they’re getting. If they’re not in a position to exercise shortly it’s game over, you had ages to be in a position to exercise the option when it was available to you.
Roon is the one that had more than 2 options. The 3rd would have been to let current annual customers upgrade to lifetime by giving them a heads up that the price was increasing.
My logic makes perfect sense. At any given point in time I can do annual, lifetime, or switch to another product. If I did a trial and then bought lifetime, and a better product came out the day after that, I’m out $119 instead of $499. That better product just hasn’t come along yet.
Nope, Roon has always provided the same parameters to get on board, subscription, subscription with anytime lifetime conversion or lifetime. They could have offered any number of other options, but those were the rules of the game they put to anyone wanting to play. Given their rules of the game it is you who had to decide whether or not to play, and if so, how. By your own admission you were not prepared to pay the opportunity cost of a lifetime license for fear something better might come along before 4.1 years (499/119) had passed. Now you pay the opportunity cost of not having exercised the option.
At no point did they imply that the subscription or lifetime price is fixed. Bum assumption on your part, and regardless you were never going to go lifetime for FOMO, so no idea why you’re crying over milk you never intended to drink. You just liked knowing it was there, in case you ever changed your mind…by which time you’d have paid n * 119 + 499, only now it’s n * 119 + 699 and n increases daily.
Don’t think I said I was never going to drink it. Said I considered it every year. And no reason I shouldn’t be peeved if they raise the price without warning / an option to buy at the lower price.
You considered it every year but did not act. So whose fault is it you missed out on the old price? It is your fault, not Roon’s. Products and services in all industries get price changes without warning. This is nothing new nor is it bad. It’s just the way it is.
I suspect Roon will kill off the lifetime subscription soon without warning. I guess that doesn’t matter to you but anyone else reading this should act soon if they are still interested in the lifetime subscription.
Why are you guys bashing on Peter Galvin?
You seem to underestimate one frame condition. All of the following software packages went cheaper over the years (regarding the past 20 years):
Microsoft/Adobe/Corel/Steinberg/Autodesk etc.
How is Peter supposed to anticipate the 40% lifetime price increase?
That‘s counter intuitive.
Offering customers a bad surprise isn‘t good marketing.
Even their Nucleus dealers weren‘t informed beforehand (and they are considered business partners). Imagine their „joy“ when discovering the new pricing.
I think your argument is flawed; there is no lifetime option for those products you listed. Indeed, most have switched to a subscription based model over recent years.