EDIT: Just took a quick look at Airbnb for Indonesian rentals. I found this: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/5021049 It's cheaper than a room from Roam.
If you want to find an individual room or villa to have by yourself, there are cheaper alternatives in the area. But the reality is that the inventory of larger properties -- say 20 to 50 units -- that are large enough to support an internal community, is much smaller across the whole island and the world, frankly speaking. The whole point of the project is community living in multiple parts of the globe, not being on your own or moving day-to-day from different Airbnbs (which is totally fine too!) So it really depends on your personal preferences of what kind of living space you think is right for you. (And lots of people have lots of different preferences, and that's OK.)
That said, most of the startup oriented stuff in Ubud seems to peg its prices to the Western world rather than local norms: there's coworking space in the City of London that costs about the same as Hubud, for example. Guess it depends on whether the community is worth paying the sort of premium the average middle class Australian holidaymaker won't.
No?
Then it's just a really expensive room with high booking/cancellation flexibility and customer lock-in (you won't pick another room in a city if you've already paid for this).
So this seems to be basically just a premium version of what a youth hostel line membership gets you. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I can imagine that the business model might work.
(If the answer is actually "Yes" then I'm surprised and 1600$ doesn't seem so bad.)