Roon is a great piece of software. No doubt about it. I love the rich metadata, I love the look, I love the UX and I love how it “just works”. Everyone I’ve shown it to agree, yet none of them have actually taken the leap, put down their hard earned cash and paid for membership - and neither have I.
Why?
I’m glad you asked, because there are actually two showstoppers for all my friends as well as myself. Solving either one of them would instantly make us all sign up and fork over the money. One of those issues is a massive undertaking that will be hard to solve, the other could be implemented before lunch today.
No mobile/WAN support. This is on the roadmap, but like I said it’s a massive (and massively daunting) task. For now, Roon is strictly LAN only, requiring you to be on the same local network as your Roon server. I’m sure it’ll come one day, but we’ll hold onto our money until then. Unless, of course, Roon was to address the much, much lower hanging fruit of showstopper #2
Yearly subscription only. I like Roon, but I don’t feel comfortable spending that much money at once on a (very nice) piece of software I might use a lot. I’m having a darn hard time seeing this as anything else than an elitist move to keep out the “filthy casuals” and to make sure only the most dedicated audiophiles join the ranks of Roon. From a business perspective, the yearly subscriptions mean that you know your budget for the next 12 months and I can see how this makes planning easier. But offering monthly subscriptions at a slight premium (Say, $12-$15 /mo) would make Roon a viable option for a heck of a lot more people. Yes, the cash flow would be less predictable than with the current model but I’m willing to bet that it would be vastly increased. This would allow Roon to focus even more on solving #1, the feature that could truly revolutionise how people use their music collection.
My suggestion/wager: Enable monthly subscriptions for a trial period of 6 months and see what happens. If I’m wrong about monthly subscriptions raking in more cash than yearly subscriptions, I will buy an annual membership, publicly apologize and stop pestering you.
Then there are those of us that HATE monthly subscriptions. I have enough other monthly bills to worry about. I got my non-audiophile, non-techie, mom to buy ROON for herself because there was a lifetime option, if there had only been a monthly subscription she would have passed on buyng it and stuck with her Windows Media Player. ACK!!
I did not say they needed or should be removed, I think options are great. Just pointing out my dislike of monthly payment plans. I wish Tidal had a lifetime or yearly plan. Of course with these types of services the lifetime plans come with risk of the business going away or new/better product being developed.
Kind of like a lifetime warranty on something then the company shutting down and poof there goes your warranty.
You really think this? That’s a bold claim to make without the slightest hint of evidence. Not sure why all of these threads complaining about the price have to use such hyperbolic language.
The move with enterprise software has been towards an annual commitment, billed monthly. Roon works out at about $10 a month - which is favourable compared to other audio services (thinking of streaming services).
Adobe, Microsoft and others have gone for the annual commitment, billed monthly. Monthly commitment is a bit of a nightmare.
Good God… buy a lifetime while you can. It’s cheaper than a decent amp. Im sure all these other options will appear in time, but I’m not sure the lifetime will be available indefinitely.
The reason a lot of people won’t buy ROON is they don’t even buy Hi Fi, they don’t even buy music. You won’t convert these people at any price IMHO
The costs associated with month by month payments is higher than 1 annual payment. I’m sure the guys have done the pricing analysis and factored that into their decision.
A quick comment on @Soren_Siim_Nielsen’s first point… Whenever I travel, I always take my laptop and a small 2TB USB drive with all my music on it. It’s quite easy to transfer the Roon license from my home desktop to my laptop. Works like a charm. Don’t want to mess with the portable drive? Just use Tidal.
Prior to Roon I had used LMS and figured out how to do WAN streaming to wherever I happened to be. It worked when it worked, but I gotta say, more often than not it was a PITA… stuttering, dropouts, etc. It was then I decided that taking my music with me was a far, far better solution.
As to monthly vs annual fee … I’m just having a hard time seeing the issue here. The only advantage I can see to a monthly fee over an annual one is to allow you to quit in any month you choose (instead of any year you choose). Is that really a big enough deal to keep you from it? Perhaps so and that would be a shame.
Personally I love having the lifetime license so that I simply don’t have to think about it anymore. Yes, it felt like a risk 2 years ago when I bought in, but I’m here to say that Roon has proven to be the best bang-for-the-buck investment in music I’ve ever made. IMO, nothing else comes close to what Roon provides. No, it’s not perfect (yet), but I’ve also never seen a company so aggressively advance the state of their product as Roon has.
