Freemium Experience: More Features for All with Usage Limits

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

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Was a bug mentioned by Justin. This supposedly has been fixed. One show with many episodes collected should be counted as one item.

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“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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Bring back the 3rd party ads.

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Looks like Trakt has also removed the widget for free users: Reddit - Dive into anything What’s next? No more API? No more third-party clients? Trakt is really pushing hard to piss off its user base.

[EDIT]
And I like the irony of this thread title: more feature for all!
Yeah, kind of…

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Indeed it is.

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Please bring back watchlist with no limits.

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Also discussed on this forum:

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So let me just post this here, because it’s apparently very common for trakt now.

  1. Introduce changes that people hate without notice.
  2. Barely respond to any of the feedback.
  3. Do the bare minimum and change back one or two things.
  4. ???
  5. Profit

It’s just so sad to me that this keeps happening over and over. At least this time people are actually cancelling and writing reviews, the Play Store rating already dropped to 3.7. I did not check if the widget works for free users on the Android version, but if someone needs a replacement, I highly recommend SeriesGuide.

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Guys, this is a lost battle. They are killing their App, I got the point of having extra feature with vip membership. But the price is almost the same as the streaming service, what is very high for a fancy “note” tool. And the limits for free users are more likely a free-preriod than an usable limit. They will star losing many users that won’t pay subscription and free plan is shit. I don’t really understand how they don’t take in account how many data they get from free users that they are going to lose…

Any recommendations for alternatives?

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