Freemium Experience: More Features for All with Usage Limits

Announcements
349

Just to add to the general feeling in this thread in case Trakt management are monitoring and/or open to reviewing the current direction.

I am a long time Trakt (free tier) user, with an extensive collection and watched history, using API integrations with a number of external packages and well over the current free tier collection limits.

I understand it is a business at the end of the day and I probably should have been paying something before now, but free was working quite nicely for what I needed so never did anything about it (my bad).

The only reason I found out about the changes was API calls failing to add items, then errors on the website when trying to update collections manually, this eventually led me to check the forums to discover the Sept price increase and the new free tier limits.

I could see paying $30/yr (with auto renewal) for the services provided that I actually use, so a little disappointed there was no real notification of the price increase/impending restrictions to give an opportunity to move to VIP before the cost/limit changes.

Would I sign up now if it was offered at $30/yr, probably, though I’d be a little wary of a large hike in the future, but I could live with it for now and review should things change.

At $60/yr I’m out, though it will be a pain to move to other services (some of which also charge) and more of a pain to change my “workflow”. I just can’t justify $60/yr for the limited functions of Trakt I make use of (I’m really not interested in much outside of having a large collection and tracking what I have watched).

From what I understand existing VIPs with auto renewal are effectively locked into the cheaper rates (for now at least). So I guess there is little financial risk to Trakt of large numbers of existing VIP users jumping ship. Any non-VIP users are then stuck jumping ship or stumping up $60/yr regardless of what functionality they may or may not use. The only existing paying customers they might lose are likely those not on auto renewal and now faced with a price hike.

A limited time offer for existing users (free and non-auto renewal) to sign up and lock in at the previous $30/yr (with auto renewal), before majorly restricting free tier functionality would have been the community friendly approach and still likely result in increased recurring revenue. Adding different tiers of membership and associated functionality/limits could also be an option. I guess it all comes down to which approach will generate the highest and most stable revenue, and these are metrics I just don’t have access to.

I’d think getting a new user signed up and then converting to a recurring subscription at $60/yr will be quite challenging, given other services available. Especially when long term users with large collections, imbedded workflows and significant time invested curating their data are potentially walking away. But again, I don’t have the metrics to determine what subscription price the market will bear and/or the cut-off point where revenue starts to fall rather than climb.

I will begin my transition elsewhere, hopeful that something suitable may come to pass with Trakt, but mindful that I need to be making alternative arrangements in case nothing changes.

Thanks for all the years of service, some rocky, most great.

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350

Totally agree with the above. Love Trakt, have been a user for years, probably should have signed up to VIP previously.

At 30 a year, I would be happy to support Trakt. At 60 a year it is worth my while moving elsewhere…

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351

I’m thoroughly enjoying marathon, but the lack of support for movies is a pity.

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352

A brief consideration. If these are really the actual numbers, you might think that they are very few … but those are probably the most important, loyal, long-standing users and who perhaps contribute the most to the whole community. This is Trakt’s way of thanking these users. Basically forcing them to leave.

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353

It’s crazy to me that people are advocating for ads. Ads are one of the worst things in existence (zero hyperbole): not only websites but whole cities are plastered with things that are meant to influence what you think and what you buy. The less companies collecting and selling our data the better.

As for the limits: I use Trakt pretty much solely to track what I watch and I don’t keep a watchlist, and I have a total of 3 lists: 1 has 50 items, 1 has 24 items, and 1 has 12 items.

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354

@justin
This service is there to track what you have watched and what you want to watch in your life. If you want to cut the basic product like this, you will no longer exist in 10 years. With this sentence no word of mouth will work: “Hey try Trakt, it only costs 60€ p.a. over 100 entries”

If you would offer 3 options it would work:

  1. free and keep data private, up to 100
  2. ad supported, up to 1000
  3. VIP …

Freemium now is crap.

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355

Two issues seem to be the theme here. As a long time Trakt VIP I want to add my opinion.

1 - 100 items is not enough

I often show Trakt to friends and family when they see me launch the app on the TV or complain about too many streaming services. For these cases I think the 100 is just fine. They get into the service, eventually hit a wall and have to decide to manage the limit or pay.

What happened here is that Trakt massively moved the limit and immediately hit a bunch of users that have felt cheated. Many comments say there should have been a grandfather clause and I agree.

2 - $60 is too much

I agree here as well, but I would probably still pay it, because I highly value this site and its service. But I can afford to pay it. As many have commented, there needs to be a mid point option.

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357

And some of these people want to be sold. They want to be the product. Make it make sense!

359

I think a Younify licence is expensive, so that could be another reason for the doubling of VIP to $60. Sometimes things can be developed inhouse, but if something already exists that can do the job much better for a price, or a steep price at that…and unfortunately, scrobbling is one feature I do not make use of, but I do understand a constant stream of income to keep developing and improving. It’s just a shame the way Trakt went about it, and cutting down free lists to a bare minimum to try and extract $60/year is an all or nothing approach.

Time will tell if Trakt has made the right decisions here. It’ll be interesting to see where the company is in 12 months time.

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360

I would gladly spend $12-$15 yearly to support the developers and get something extra, e.g., filters. But I think killing Trakt’s base functionality for free users was a bad decision and should be revisited. I don’t say you should give it for free, but the VIP is overpriced, and no other tier is available for users to consider buying.

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361

Geeeez, it’s amazing how entitled people feel for features on a free service.
As Justin has pointed out, Trakt is a small company so these changes are obviously to help support that (I’m guessing mainly in the server-load department).

It seems like everyone seems to think lists didn’t have limits up until now so let’s compare:

5 personal lists - down to 2
500 personal list items - down to 100 (it was only 250 pre-2022 and your existing lists stay)
1000 watchlist items - down to 100 (again, it was only 250 pre-2022 and your existing watchlist stays)

Sure, the watchlist items are a big drop, but as Justin points out, that’s 5.8% of users. The fact of the matter is, if you’re Tracking tons of stuff, you are not only in a minority, but you’re a ‘pro user’. It’s totally fair to expect pro users to pay for services that cost money to run.

And that’s the thing. I’ve seen many people say along the lines of ‘if Trakt is a healthy company, with no revenue problem, why do this?’

Well, that’s what you do as a business, you anticipate things. You don’t wait until you have a problem before making changes and trying to get quick money. Justin and the team are obviously planning for future growth. They’re certainly seeing more and more users come to this platform, especially through third party apps like Sequel.

Finally, Trakt doesn’t sell your data. Frankly, if you wanted more features for free, maybe they’d have to. Do you really want that?

No one likes having to pay for more things, especially subscriptions. But the fact is, if this service is providing you with great quality features that you use on a daily basis, why not pay for it? I understand it’s disappointing to have lower limits on lists but if that 5.8% of users with more than 100 items in their watch list goes up to 10%, that costs Trakt a lot more money that they aren’t getting at all from those extra 4.2%.

I appreciate Justin being honest and upfront about these changes, plus he seems to be listening and responding to complaints. I wish all tech companies were like this.

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362

That said, maybe another tier should be available for larger lists and a couple of other features if users don’t want to pay the full VIP subscription. @justin

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363

So 5.8% of users have to pay for all other to “keep” the website alive cause they have mmore than 100 movies watched ? x)

btw the price is crazy… when you see all other website its half of that

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I was about to buy premium but reading this comments just makes sense. There will be other cheaper options, there will always be…

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I can see others naming competitors so it seems to be allowed. I intend no harm, mods feel free to delete this if it breaks rules. Just providing some information and opinion for those who are curious.

I am also using Simkl now. As others have mentioned there is already a Kodi addon for scrobbling and some addon developers are adding watchlist support to their addons. For me this is more than sufficient for my limited needs.

Just for reference, MDBlist has various tiers, starting at €1 to open up quite a lot of features. Simkl has various tiers, possibility for a one-time VIP fee and rewards regular usage with free Pro. These are acceptable pricing models, and very reasonable prices for the service offered. Easy to fork up such small amounts, and I already have.

On the other hand we have Trakt increasing their price to the point where it is approaching actual streaming service fees…no tiers, no regional pricing, no one-time fee, nothing new for the VIP tier, locking features behind a paywall. :roll_eyes:
In my opinion, the price was already too high before the hike, especially for the limited usage of a particular feature (keeping a watchlist of things I plan to watch). Trakt is just a ‘nice-to-have’ service and was convenient but in no way essential. It doesn’t offer enough convenience to match the price, especially not now. Others may disagree, fair enough if they need the other features or are power users. Go ahead and enjoy.

The only way these changes make sense is if the objective is to reduce the number of users for whatever reason, which is absolutely your prerogative if so.
All users affected by this either have to pay up the exorbitant price, accept that they can only ever collect or plan to watch 100 items, or use a different service. An option to have larger lists for a small fee would obviously have worked very well, but that was not what was done here. There are more potential options of course but that option seems one of the better ones as opposed to ads for the free tier etc.

Personally, my income is not unlimited, nor is it in USD, and a large portion of it goes towards essentials; so I can honestly only afford support to those services that are of good value, reasonable price, have excellent features useful to me and/or treat their regular users well.

At the moment Trakt is none of these…

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366

This is a joke. Please remove this limit for free accounts. I’ve been using this app to track my movies, now I’ll use google sheets. I’m not gonna pay $6/month for that. No one here is in favor of these changes. Please undo all of this

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367

For people who use kodi + elementum - watchlist is still an option. Collection was amazing, but i guess we need to move on. :frowning:

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Indeed! Would that be the reason that every now and then we see a post here from someone who expects to be able to watch movies / TV shows (the actual content) using Trakt?

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370

This sucks. Collect one tv show with many seasons and thats it for the whole list. Time to look elsewhere.

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372

“If this service is providing you with great quality features that you use on a daily basis, why not pay for it?”

Happy to, if it’s a reasonable price. $60 is unreasonable - hence why people are unhappy. Also to point out, VIP already had a bunch of great features, there was really no need to lock more behind VIP than there already was. It has only served to alienate free users who may have bought VIP in the future.

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I just tried to add a new show