Nothing, but it is going to be diminishing gains every time they do it if enough members leave every time something like this happens.
Itāll eventually get to the point thereās no one left to upset. 
5 Likes
Hello,
long time VIP user here(12+ years), Iāve always lurked on the forums from time to time but never posted anything.
Like many others said Iāve always viewed VIP as a way to support Trakt more than a way to benefit of features (most of the now VIP features werenāt available 12 years ago, as a side note is funny to think that all those years ago one of the VIP features was the Forum we are now writing on 
)
The only VIP feature I use is the Plex automatic scrobbler which by the way is not always working (but could be an issue on their end or maybe on my network ecc, not blaming trakt for this at all) and I donāt know if iām within the limits of the Lists for the free plan as I only have 4 of these (the couchmoney.tv ones).
Aside from this I enjoy watching the Year stats when December comes and thatās it
I tryied the new automatic tracking when it got launched but found out it didnāt really fit my needs as there was no way (as far as I can tell) to decide what to filter or what not and it cluttered my viewed history with things that maybe I did only started for like 10 seconds and than closed, but I get that this is not an issue of trakt too but instead the way some services handle those things natively (es. Disney+)
Anyway, Iāve read most of the topics about the price increase and the replyies here in this one and to be honest I get it, itās no longer sustainable to offer the VIP package as a whole for 15$/year .
Iām trying to decide what to do because the idea of canceling the VIP membership after all these years saddens me, but my usage is probably not enough to justify a 300% increase of the yearly cost.
The thing Iām currently unsure about is that Iāve received the offer to renew for another year at a 30$ price, and Iām evaluating it just to see another year of those planned new features/enhancements etc.. and decide if itās worth to me to pay 60$ from the year after or not, but I donāt get why I have to decide on this offer in 30 days instead of it to happen naturally when the time comes, I donāt like this push on FOMO
To conclude if thereās some sort of way to express our āvoteā I would also like to vote at this point for tiered plans. (You could even do this like car insurances like 10$ starting price and then if you want letās say glass protection +2$, if you want weather insurance +3$ ecc 
)
I get it that it wonāt be easy to accomodate everyone needs and that it will defeat the purpose stated in the announcement to simplify things but I think it would be a nice compromise toward the community that has been receiving this VIP change vary badly (as it probably always is when one raises prices )
Last but not least welcome to the Trakt team and best of luck 
3 Likes
Probably real busy, working out new budgets, with the revenue downfall, itās going to be a lot of work.
no need to disparage trakt, just dont mention it when helping others set up kodi. theres no need to disparage any company to try to āsellā another. it makes the one youāre trying to sell look worse rather than better
3 Likes
2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Upcoming VIP Renewal Pricing Changes
Not really, Iām just not seeing new questions or new information to share 
Yes! Not on what you are saying but on what I said above.
Imagine doing pricing:
- For a service thatās been around for years,
- With a user base thatās massive and diverse,
- And features that span tracking, stats, discovery, social, and more.
Then throw in:
- A need to stay fair and sustainable, while keeping things simple enough.
Pricing isnāt easy, especially for a service like Trakt that is a bit like a Swiss army knife. Some users rely on just one feature. Others use the whole toolbox. And everyone has different ideas of whatās essential and whatās āextraā. Just look at the thread asking people the 3 features they would want in a new tierā¦ and thatās taking into account ~120 voters (at the time Iām writing this).
No matter how you slice it, someone will feel overcharged or underserved. Thatās the challenge of pricing a product people love and rely on, in very different ways.
Weāre navigating this carefully, looking at feedback and ideas here, and at the data we are sill gathering.
4 Likes
So, clearly the answer is to make sure that everyone feels overcharged or underserved?
Imagine going over your expenses, and finding every service you use has decided to double (or more) itās pricing with very little warning. Most people would have to make some changes. Now imagine itās just one service that does thisā¦ not a very difficult decision to figure out which one to drop.
No matter how you try to spin this, there can be no question that Trakt management has handled this whole matter unbelievably poorly. To make things worse, there seems to be a concerted effort to keep digging the hole deeperā¦
13 Likes
Please people keep to the topic.
Use this topic to ask Kevin anything and to reply to what he said. Otherwise, your post will be against our Forum Guidelines.
2 Likes
Once again I will ask, please, use the topic for itās intended purpose.
Otherwise the posts will be against the forum guidelines.
2 Likes
You did it correctly, nothing wrong with that post. I just removed the other ones that had nothing to do with Kevin or what he said.
1 Like
Welcome!
@kcador I would like to say that so far, the communication that I have seen from you has been laudable. Especially from someone who has just started. And It is very much appreciated.
This makes sense. I do not think people fully understand the cost to run a database, much less the cost if you have redundancy. But this should have been communicated.
Why was this not communicated earlier when users started to blame this as the cause of the price changes? If it was, there wouldnāt be users currently blaming the implementation of Younify.
I think a lot of the frustration that users are having mainly boils down toā¦
- The sudden increase in subscription cost. 100% increase is hard to swallow. Up to 300% for some. A gradual increase would have gone over better.
- The promise that there would be a grandfathering in of old prices.
- Lack of response to concerns. This is leaving the user base feeling ignored. Especially missing from Justin and/or Sean.
- Lack of proper notice/feedback taken before the increase. TOS violation.
- Frustration spilled over from other recent controversies.
- General lack of transparency, I understand that Trakt cannot give away all of itās secrets
but it doesnāt have to be so vague. You need to help people understand the why behind decisions.
I used to be one of the most active users on this forum until life got in the way. Not sure if itās still around, but I was the first to gain the title of āRegular,ā which granted some MOD privileges based on forum activity.
As you can probably imagine, Trakt has always stood out to me as the company with the best communication Iāve ever encountered. Even if there was a conflict on a subject, it was handled with professionalism and we felt listened to.
So imagine my surprise when I see the degradation in communication since then. Or more so the lack thereof when it covers large changes, both before and after.
For the record I wouldnāt have minded paying the $60 to support Trakt, but the way it was handled was very poor and makes me think twice about it upon renewal.
Just my two cents.
12 Likes
This right here shows why there SHOULD be tiers.
If you have 2 users, one pays $60 and doesnāt use Younify TRAKT gets $60. If another user pays $60 and does use Younify TRAKT receives $60 minus the costs for funding the usage cost for that aspect.
But both receive the exact same other services.
Add to this that I believe the Younify scrobbling doesnāt work for all geographic locations yet (maybe mistaken here but Iām pretty sure some countries were having issues with it working) then it becomes even more absurd. Non-USA based supporters are automatically paying more for services they canāt even use.
How does that make any sense?
And because itās an AMA, explain to me exactly what Rippple provides that a user canāt already get from Trakt.
And please explain in more detail the partnership deals. It seems to me the benefit is for you as a Rippple developer because you get a referral fee. How does that benefit existing VIPs here the other way around? Do we get a discount or does Trakt get a cut if we pay to buy Rippple (not even clear what the cost is for that)? Depending on your reply to this I probably will have some more questions and observations because it seems to me that VIP payers here have been supporting the development and API access for other Apps then to make money out of at no cost to them.
Edited to Add as an afterthought / question:
One item I havenāt seen addressed or mentioned is the fact that some App Stores had a reduced pricing level to better line up with their income / costs / comparable services.
So are these special deals now defunct too?
And if not, what is preventing other users from accessing that store in a similar fashion to how many people used a Brazilian IP to game the system when Plex made some adjustments to their pricing levels.
4 Likes
What it seems like to me is that Younify is (mostly) indirectly responsible for the increase in cost, namely that this integration is seen as the āmissing linkā and the golden ticket to a big boy company with the possibility of automatically keeping track of peopleās history across their streaming services instead of having to do this manually. And they are seemingly heavily spending on this direction by hiring tons of new staff and developing āTrakt Liteā to make it more easy to use to a casual crowd.
So while Younify itself might have costs attached, it seems to me more that they are trying to aggressively scale up the company and making the VIPās pay for it.
4 Likes
This all makes sense, another theory ( given all the new heads in chat from " the company"), has Younify taken over Trakt now and are the main player??
Thereās many missing links in this and it has escalated at an incredible rate, something is astray 1+1 no longer = 2 for some odd reason.
This is not what Iām saying. The point was on ātieringā that is seen as a silver bullet by some when it is not.
This is a point of view, not a question.
That point was about a business decision (pricing/tiering) not about a legal issue weāve overlooked, corrected and apologized for already.
Thank you, much appreciated!
Better, yes!
Iām looking into this with the team. Also trying to see how we can make communication stick better. Thereās a lot of information that is not trusted, highly diluted and/or sometimes deconstructed on the forum. This is an issue we have to work on.
Thanks for your whole feedback!
Nothing but a different experience. It is a Trakt client. Just a way to interact with Trakt that is different but the same like many other third-party apps.
Rippple does have some features that Trakt doesnāt:
- you can āpinā shows on top of your Up Next
- you can build your own āShelfā page (think about building your own Netflix page)
- you have a āPulseā showing you all the interaction you had with a media on a timeline
- Rippple had a drop feature before Trakt did and then I back-ported it to use Trakt
- ā¦
But Iām not sure your question is on the feature-setā¦ best is to try it but I you are 200% okay with Trakt (on a feature and UI/UX level), then no need.
This has been explained already above in this thread.
No, they are not.
For the moment, we are only offering it through the App Store, not via the website for this reason. Iām not saying itās bullet-proof, just that it is what it is and we are playing the rules of the App Store and Play Store (including the ~30% commission to Apple/Google and other providers we need to pay).
No!
2 Likes
Iāve removed some posts here for being off topic, so they were breaking our Forum Guidelines.
Please keep the discussion here focused on the questions for Kevin and his answers.
4 Likes
It may not be what you are saying. Regardless, it is what Trakt is actually doing.
No one is pretending tiering would be a silver bullet, but it would be, at the very least, a choice for end users to not have to pay for a bunch of features that are not needed by them.
3 Likes
Scrobbling has always been a thing on Trakt. This doesnāt mean we want to prevent people from using Trakt.
Some people just see the tracking part as cumbersome and want their stats and recommendations without doing it.
Iām mostly checking in (via Rippple nowadays) and I will probably never scrobble but I see the value for some users in the feature.
Yes!
Not at all 
Those are two different things. The move appears to be more sustainable and is a hard decision to take because it will result in widespread backlash. Would you prefer we take moves that do not result in backlash but are not sustainable?
Sorry, it wasnāt as formal but still.
It is not because we are trying to navigating carefully that we are not going to make mistakes. We want to avoid doing mistakes, business mistakes and legal ones.
This is your perception. If you feel like you are overcharged or underserved, you can cancel your subscription.
This has been answered already above, you rarely use 100% of the subscription you pay to services. If you feel overcharged or underserved, you can cancel your subscription.
1 Like
Auto scrobbling is a huge plus for me. But all trakt alternatives have this (or most).
2 Likes