If you buy a set of wheels dedicated to winter tires, then you can swap between summer and winter in thirty minutes at home.

Otherwise, you need to put your dirty tires in the back seat, drive to a shop, pay $100 and wait for an hour or two to get them swapped and balanced.

Yep, that. I guess TPMS for the winter rims would be a one-time cost that should outlast the tires, but it's still pretty common to not get it. An extra ~$800 up front, last time I had a tire replaced the sensor ended up damaged anyway, and if your winter tire pressure is different it'll just complain uselessly anyway.

Plus, if you're already spending >$1000 for winter tires/wheels, it's hard to justify TPMS on top of that.

And if you're paying that much for the added safety/performance, you're not the kind of person who needs TPMS to nag them into inflating to the proper pressure.

If you're spending >$1000 on tires, how is a $80 set of TPMS hard to justify?

Presumably you're buying snow tires for safety reasons. Proper tire pressure is important for traction, thus safety. And winter is the time when tire pressure fluctuates the most.

Sure, but if you’re the kind of person who buys winter tires (which IME is pretty rare in the widwest USA), you probably know that and check your pressure every couple weeks. And it probably only fluctuates a couple PSI which is well within safe bounds.

> And winter is the time when tire pressure fluctuates the most

genuinely curious, why? I thought tire pressure fluctuations were linearly related to air temperature fluctuations. does the temperature vary more in the winter than in the summer?

At least in some of the US, quite a bit more. Winter might be swings of >50F, especially night to day, while summer variation is likely to be <40F. I'm not what all weather patterns factor into that, but a major part is that winter air is dryer, and water vapor does a lot to 'buffer' brief temperature changes.

That said, I mostly end up checking my tires more in the winter because I care more; if a tire is only a few pounds low I'd still prefer to handle it before I have to go drive on snow during a cold snap.

Sensors are frequently and unavoidably damaged during unmounting. Many shops just replace the sensors as a matter of course when replacing the tire, since there is no way to test the sensor until the new tire is mounted and inflated.