Here’s some wisdom from a serial entrepreneur:
The idea is a difficulty of one.
Proving it works is a difficulty of 10.
Making a viable release is a difficulty of 100.
Keeping customers happy is a difficulty of 1000.
The magic of something like Roon is that it makes it all look easy! (Well, other than ripping multi disc sets…)
We, the users, only see the tip of the iceberg. But there is a HUGE iceberg that needs to keep working.
Matt
I think Roon is great value, if you consider the effect it has on your listening habits. I have never listened to so much music or enjoyed it so much since purchasing Roon.
At $500 for a lifetime license with all of the care to curate all of your music I think is a great deal
I bought a lifetime membership fir 499$ at the beginning. Roon is the best music management software in the market and compared to the money I spend on my equipment, this is insignificant. If you collect live recordings, there’s nothing like the flexibility it gives you. I have over 5TB of my own music and Roon let’s me name & tag it the way I want.
Just curious how many albums would it take to fill 5TB?
It’s not just ‘released’ albums, it’s live recordings going all the way back to the 60’s…I’m getting ready to add more storage…
cd quality flac, about 10k
We sell SaaS in a niche area and have comparable charges to Roon. We also get plenty of people suggesting cheaper prices for different currencies or because they are just starting up etc. (“think of it as investment in us”). Unfortuantely, the licence fees we pay and the software development costs don’t change depending on who we sell to. Nor are we a charity. In fact, support is usually more expensive for non cookie-cutter customers.
Prices are largely determined by the costs but charging one customer $1000 is certainly more appealing than charging $1 to1000 customers, and having 1000x the support load.
For a product with low support requirements and a large customer base, you can lower prices, open up new regions and attract more customers. I suspect Roon is still quite niche though.
First, Roon is not SaaS. It’s not even ASP. SaaS implies single point of hosting, multiple users and no distribution. Microsoft outlook (the web version) is a good example of SaaS software. ASP implies single server hosting, multiple clients. By the way, It will be very nice if Roon will go that way and became a real SaaS application (and by that serverless from the users point of view).
Second, though theoretically your statement above makes sense, in real life it looks like the opposite: the accent is more on the service that you provide, and less on the application. And it’s not only roon, hence the very pour general state of the music/streaming applications.
99 percent of the software prior SaaS was dealing with the curent version’s bugs for free, it’s a fact. Major versions updates were paid for, but not forced (you could use the previous version for more than a decent amount of time). The model still works today. Even more, the pay once forever model still works for some big names (Affinity vs. PhotoShop for example) which is just another proof that the pseudo SaaS approach is here for the money not for innovation and real development.
It’s highly dependent on what you use Roon for, for me it’s a library management system. I rarely use the bio feature, couldn’t care less for the album covers etc. I bought the lifetime subscription and I’m glad I did. I doubt I would have continued with it on an annual basis.
I don’t have a music subscription service eg Tidal I only listen to music I own. I haven’t bothered trying to make it work with classical music, tried once and it was a disaster.
My biggest gripe with Roon is that it doesn’t sort music into folders on my NAS, I have to manually do that.
What do you meen. I also have Tidal HiFi, but there is no cost to spare with Tidal + Roon or what?
What would it do that for?
I think the only fair thing to do about Roon’s pricing is to form an international pricing commission, populated with noted economists, musical artists, and people with good taste and sense. They would meet monthly to gauge the customers’ and prospective customers’ overall reaction to Roon’s pricing structure. If they found ten or more people who were unhappy, the commission would have the power to adjust rates to something more palatable.
The commission would also oversee Roon’s inevitable liquidation.
Stuff costs what it costs, people have wages to pay… we make choices everyday, we have to. If Roon is important enough, people will pay for it. This in turn funds Roon, pays wages and associated costs and we move forward.
If people don’t see the value, they don’t pay and Roon folds.
Luckily, enough people see the value, appreciate the project and choose to support it. Music isn’t free and I know that can be a shock to those in the Spotify World, but realistically we live in a golden age and should be prepared to contribute.
If we left it to the Music Industry, we would never have anything like Roon, developing this took real vision and a passion…
Prices are based on what the market will bear. Evidently, 250,000 people think Roon is priced fairly.
I too think Roon is priced fairly.
aah, sweet market capitalism sense! I thought we were losing our way…
And that’s from a liberal person.
No one’s perfect Jim. 
