The Reaper DAW offers 2 licenses. A commercial license at $225 and a discounted one at $60. Both licenses give access to the complete DAW. The discounted license is for non profits, educational programs and personal use as long as yearly gross revenue does not exceed USD $20,000. There's even an indefinite free trial with no limitations for evaluation purposes.

The Application itself has no limitations. Once you understand it you can progress onto the better mastering and editing qualities then all other DAW applications.

No need to install Wine, Reaper supports Linux natively.

No complex activation shenanigans. No dongle and such.

Alongside generally quick pace of updates, Reaper developers pay very close attention to user feedback and are constantly adding features based on their requests so much so that some even consider it somewhat of a crowdsourced DAW.

Records in WAV, AIFF, FLAC, WAVPACK, OGG and MP3.

You don't have to go to a separate editor to edit audio files. You can work directly on the track, and drop/drag pieces to other tracks, sew them together. It's a fun sandbox and easy peasy.

Thought has been given to many time-saving features and shortcuts which speed up workflow considerably.

Reaper lets users change to different themes, supports the use of a wealth of (free) extensions and has a lot of options when it comes to rendering.

No software DRM enforcement.

Reaper's will tailor itself to fit your computer's processing power by automatically using the "anticipative FX processing" feature.

Most DAWs have a tendency to crash constantly, reaper crashes very rarely.

Reaper is lightweight enough to be run off of a flash drive; the installer weights less than 20 MB and the portable installation option is included in it.

Its plugin support is amazing.

There are no limits on amount of tracks and effects that those tracks can be equipped with.

In Reaper, a track is a track is a track. There is no distinction among MIDI, stereo, mono, surround or any other tracks, and that means it's possible to put clips of all kinds on the same track. This approach makes the Reaper DAW seem a lot more intuitive than other DAWs.

You can route anything anywhere audio / midi you name it, cross route it...

Can run on devices like the Raspberry Pi 3, Pine64, and ODroid Single-Board-Computer systems, as well as devices like the Pinebook, and Chromebooks that have been reformatted with a non-android Linux OS.

You can have open multiple projects via tabs at the top left and easily drag and drop clips, instruments and ideas between each project at ease.

Without prior experience with DAW, you can install Reaper, set up ASIO drivers, connect to your amp and mikes, get the hang of recording/re-recording tracks, and render an mp3 in just a few hours. You can accomplish the basics very fast.

You can control nearly everything via OSC (and Midi, too).

When using a 64-bit installation of Reaper, all 32-bit plugins will still work alongside 64-bit plugins. On computers with an x86-64 CPU and an OS that supports multi-architecture, you can also run bridged 64-bit plugins on 32-bit Reaper.

A freeze can be applied to a group, and then picked apart track by track.

The GUI is simple and easily gets information across to the user

Set the cursor, press a key, done. No need to switch cursor editing modes or work around "smart" cursors.

Download is still less than 20Mb, unlike others that are 6Gb+.

Can connect with a touch screen device over LAN to use as web embedded remote control surface.

Can run edited Script tools programmed by users.

You can have one version and the future version when its out.

Running smoothly with 50 tracks on i5 gen3 RAM 4GB laptop (mixing and mastering work done separately).

Reaper allows editing while you're recording for a performative and fluid workflow. This feature can also help save time when mixing.

These two things are the biggest advantage of Reaper. No other DAW can beat it based on CPU efficiency. Some people say Reaper isn't a professional DAW by look, but it's not true. Reaper is a full-featured professional DAW. You can do anything whatever you want for music production.
The price is also reasonable. They are even generous with the evaluation policy. If they offer the simple and intuitive version, I'll be back to Reaper.

You can customize Reaper with hundreds of themes, or make them yourself.

If you want to use it as a glorified tape machine and nothing else, you'll still be able to get work done. If you want to learn all the shortcuts, scripts, custom actions and macros and really unlock what Reaper can do, you can do that as well. Either way, you'll still be able to make music.

In Reaper, you can record MIDI and Audio onto the same track. As well, there are no distinctions between any form of audio. Surround Sound, Mono, Stereo files, and anything else you can think of; all of this can be recorded onto the same track.