Jim Roseberry
Their situation business-wise is very unique.  They're not reliant on Reaper turning X amount of profit.

That argument is repeated again and again, especially in this forum. But is there any evidence that is really the case?
 
I mean from what I can see in Reaper, the biggest investment of Justin into it is his own time.
There is no sky buildings with ebony furniture, no "investors" which want profit just from money and there is no "top managers", which understand nothing in music, nothing in programming but always claim own super importance (even when business is going down, as the result of "top management").
I mean I can imagine Reaper is profitable, in terms of money, for developers. And I can not care less about anyone else.
 

azslow3
Their situation business-wise is very unique.  They're not reliant on Reaper turning X amount of profit.


I mean from what I can see in Reaper, the biggest investment of Justin into it is his own time.
There is no sky buildings with ebony furniture, no "investors" which want profit just from money and there is no "top managers", which understand nothing in music, nothing in programming but always claim own super importance (even when business is going down, as the result of "top management").
I mean I can imagine Reaper is profitable, in terms of money, for developers. And I can not care less about anyone else.

FWIW, I didn't say Reaper isn't turning a profit.  
There's little overhead...
But I seriously doubt Justin is overly concerned about it (as long as it's not losing large amounts).
 
If you read about Justin's background, unless he has an absurdly lavish life-style, I don't think he needs to worry about money.   
That's a *drastically* different situation than most DAW software companies... and their employees.

∞
 
 
 
 

I think ... No. But ... what is god?
Comparing DAWs is like looking for the best looking girl ever.
 
For me Cubase is the best choice. For you? Maybe Audition, Harrison Mixbus? I don't know, because it's YOUR turn to find it out.
 
No other DAW is comparable to Sonar, no other DAW is comparable to Cubase, no other DAW ist comparable to S1. More?
 

I can imagine that Justin is selling a lot of licenses at $60 a pop. Even if he's only selling 10 a day, that's $4200 in revenue a week, more than enough to sustain a comfortable lifestyle if your overheads are low (and as far as I'm aware he's not shipping out boxed copies or spending a ton on Facebook advertising). 

Sry, Justin made me laugh ;) His product is far away from a to-go-DAW. No audio-editor, less intense for an usable gui, dialogs like Win 3.11 for workgroups, obsessive usage of one track type only, no usable drum-editor and so on and so on ...

It's a great marketing strategy in that he gets the software on as many machines as possible. It's also built a very large online community. I love how they have so many themes available plus the SWS extensions. 
 
One thing that does get overlooked, it's easy to do this when you don't bundle the program with a lot of 3rd party things. If you started with just Reaper on your computer, you would hit some limitations. It's attractive to me at $60 because I have a lot of 3rd party stuff from Native Instruments, Arturia, KORG etc that integrate into the program. Without those, I would probably spend the extra $$ to get a DAW with all the extra content. 
 

awake1994
Sry, Justin made me laugh ;) His product is far away from a to-go-DAW. No audio-editor, less intense for an usable gui, dialogs like Win 3.11 for workgroups, obsessive usage of one track type only, no usable drum-editor and so on and so on ...

I've been using Reaper on a project for just a few days and in that time I've already decided that it's light years ahead of Sonar in terms of design, usability, stability, bugs etc. And that's just with the default theme. Just compare the track managers for the two DAW's for example. Reaper's may have an "old" look about it, but it terms of functionality it's so much better (and actually works properly, unlike Sonar's). 

$60 for the DAW, and if you know where to look there are some very good free instruments and effects that are great for starters.  Pianos, basses, guitars, synths, samplers, drum kits, virtual guitar amps, etc.   So you don't absolutely have to buy extra content until you want to.  But it's not like you have to.  So not a huge limitation.
 
Like you said, if you are established already, you likely have a ton of plugins.  Either way, it's a great value, if the workflow suits you.

After digging in deep on the program for about 3 weeks, I can easily duplicate and even expand on my workflow from SONAR.  The fact that a track is a track is a track with Reaper may seem off putting at first, but the extra flexibility that it gives you is amazing. You can set up all kinds of default track templates and effects chains to make things easy for you as you see fit. I just started working with mouse modifiers (thanks Alexi for the tip) and that has made certain other things easier.  Can't beat the CPU usage either. It doesn't even blink when I start loading up Kontakt. I've been slowly migrating over at my home studio and will probably push to get additional licenses at my work now that I know this will do the job we need.