Freemium Experience: More Features for All with Usage Limits

I’ll do the comparison the other way round, then.
I pay for Amazon Prime 49PLN/year. I get free shipping, access to thousands of hours of content in Prime Video and Prime Gaming, and other perks.
Trakt VIP costs almost 250PLN/year (5 times more than Prime), gives me no original content, and, as much as I like it, is not much more for me than a very fancy spreadsheet.
Do you see the problem here?

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The problem here is that you did not read the edit at the bottom of my post :slight_smile:

Edit: I know I am looking at it from a ‘western’ point of view and not taking into account other countries eg India, where Trakt is more expensive than than other local stuff for you guys. My reasoning above is not aimed at you.

49PLN is less than £10. If I could get Amazon for that I would be jumping with joy. It costs £90 a year here (455PLN) and that’s with adverts! In comparison, Trakt VIP is £48, just over half the amount.

But I get your point, perhaps it was not a good comparison, hence the edit I added a few hours after the original post.

I think it was more a case of trying to talk myself into thinking $60 was a fair deal. :rofl:

Haha, you know very well it isn’t fair. :slight_smile: Don’t fall prey to the Endowment Effect (Endowment effect - Wikipedia) as some of the other VIPs seem to have done.

Just because Amazon Prime is overpriced in your country doesn’t make this Trakt pricing any better lol.
I just looked it up. Amazon Prime costs me $99 CAD a year, Trakt now costs $85.82 CAD a year. :exploding_head:
These services are obviously in no way commensurate; but the prices now are. I am really surprised there are actually people trying to defend this (although if I consider the ‘politics’ of it, and people’s biases, maybe not that surprising).

To put it YET another way, if bread (substitute with any commodity/item you wish) doubled in price, does it make sense to attack/insult the people who complain about it because you have a existing deal to get the bread at the original price?

Some people used to get free crust with a little bit of bread on it because they could not afford (or didn’t want) whole loaves. Now they get just a little crust with no actual bread on it, only those who buy full loaves get bread.
Leaving these people hungry and unsatisfied, so most likely they will switch to eating rice instead (despite whatever preference they may have for bread) because that didn’t unnecessarily double in price and the free rice doesn’t leave them still hungry.
Of course the farmer and baker need to make money for their hard work, but charging double what they did before, without making the bread any better, and while reducing the quality of that free crust?
Yeaah, that will deeefinitely make them more money. :roll_eyes:

I know this is a strange analogy but maybe this will help the naysayers understand the problem…

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Who have I attacked? Completely bemused by this paragraph.

FYI: If I continue my VIP membership next year, I’ll be paying $60 myself. That’s IF I stay. :person_tipping_hand:

I didn’t say you’ve attacked anyone. :slight_smile: But some people who complained certainly have been attacked in this thread in a very entitled way. Not targeted at you, my aplogies.

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You have a Trakt light webpage now. How about VIP light to just remove the limits? They’re absolutely ridiculous and $60 a year is definitely too expensive, don’t need all that stuff. Just the lists.
But looks like I have to look for alternatives now. Let‘s see if Kevin from Rippple is open to implementing other services because I already pay for that.

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Just wow, 487 messages and we are just in January… after that really dumb move.

Record of a post in messages and reactions since the forum was created? Good job Trakt. Well done. Looks like the users looks happy. :rofl:

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How come you won’t explain what DEI stands for? I think everyone here also is wondering too. I’m still curious to understand what it stands for. Is it a made up acronym? I only have one question, so hope we get an answer lol.

I see where you’re coming from, but unless you’re able to get away without using the collection feature then it’s hard to have a solution with the current state of things. I would’ve thought media centres are the Source of Truth therefore you don’t need anything but the history but I’ve never used one to know.

It’s hard to say anything without sounding like I’m telling you what to do or “too bad” but if three people are using one account so much and you’re that invested and there’s no other alternatives, $100 between three people doesn’t seem that bad. If it were 3 people paying ($300) yeah I tend to have similar issues but perhaps you’d be able to have one account with the sub to sync your collection and then two other free accounts that don’t need it. As you suggested, people who don’t want to pay just won’t, and others will adapt or work around.

Again, it’s hard for me to understand completely how media centres work without having used one.

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After my reply here I’m personally not going to reply to any more thing regarding the price doubling because it’s been rehashed so many times and been explained that it hasn’t changed for 9 years and has been readjusted for now and into the future. If it’s too high, that’s a Trakt problem not a user problem because as you say, people will only pay what they thing is worth it.

I will say that for one last comparison regarding “Trakt reaching Streaming prices”, Netflix has almost doubled their standard pricing in the last ~10 years also, and is otherwise much more expensive than Trakt, for the purpose that it has the actual media content I guess? From ~USD$10/mth (~USD$120/yr) in 2015 to ~USD$18/mth (~USD$215/yr) in 2025 source. Sure they have tiers but thats their choice and their base is still USD$7 I think and has ads.

To your point, yes you’re able to stay as a free user and if things change in the future you can adapt at that point.

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My point was to show an example for what’s important and choosing where to spend your money. I’m not a sales person trying to sell you something and was trying to give a personal perspective, but you’re welcome to take it that way. But this doesn’t make me want to try give any more reasoning when people were otherwise asking for something from the Trakt team.

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Not sure if related, but a 401 is unauthorised, so may need to log out and back in.

Thanks for replying but it’s clear that you (and, it seems, the Trakt team in general) don’t understand how Kodi addons work and it’s nowhere near as simple as some may think. And this isn’t to criticise you or anything like that, either, so please don’t take it that way. With Kodi, you don’t login as different users or have separate accounts for anything.

It used to be that Trakt Collection used to be the only way to use a synced list with multiple Kodi addons, and/or installed on multiple devices. Over time, better support for Kodi lists has been incorporated but I’ve always just kept using the Collection because all of our shows were there and it literally makes no difference whether our shows are in a Collection or a list…so anyone saying that using a Trakt Collection is “wrong” has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to Trakt being used with Kodi addons, nor the legacy reasons behind using Collection vs a list.

And when I say 3 people, it’s not like my wife and I count as 2 separate people for payment :face_with_raised_eyebrow: but my issue is still that no prior notice was provided to users via email, which would seem to have been the easiest thing in the world to do. IF this had happened, I would have jumped on to the $30 payment if there was no other option. It’s very, very clear that many other users also had no idea about any of these changes because I keep seeing posts by people (here, on Reddit and in FB groups) asking what is going on because they can’t add anything to their lists. This BS is absolutely a serious communication issue by Trakt and it’s really obvious that the company’s rep is taking a serious beating globally….I’ve seen many, many, many posts by people saying they’re ditching Trakt, regardless of whether they’re free users or VIP.

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@Ohifriend I greatly appreciate you taking the time out of your day to give your opinion and answer questions. Sorry if we come off as a bit abrasive, but given the topic I think it’s understandable due to how bad faith this has been from the start (the whole dressing this up in a nice cute dress of “more features for all!!!” while drastically slashing the free user experience, even for users that have been around for decades it seems). Not to mention no forewarning on this and just having this post as a sole source of information where users who don’t manage to find this post have to either just keep spending hours trying to figure out what’s changed and baffled why it happened without warning beforehand or as it happened. If you believe emailing the userbase and letting them know of this obviously big change from the norm is a good idea, please let your higher ups know. If you disagree that’s understandable. Have a good rest of your day!

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Thats fair - I really don’t know how it works but if there’s an alternative set up, I’d suggest looking into it is all, if you’re not wanting to pay.

Regarding # of people, when you purchase food you technically count as two people, so per account is what I was suggesting whereas you use one therefore share the cost. But yes I understand if you were staying at a hotel for a holiday you’d pay for one room between two. Hotels usually set their prices for that max limit though, and if one person stays you pay the same or try find a smaller room (not always available in the same places). But that’s off topic now :smile:

I guess there’s not much more I can do myself but I know what you mean by many people suggesting they’re leaving. Time will tell.

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Thanks for the kind words. Yeah I understand it’s frustrating and to a degree I can’t say you’re wrong and users should call out seemingly dodgy practices (not just here but in general).

All I’m saying is, as I can’t myself revert any changes, and am just trying to provide steps to work around.

As I suggested somewhere above, there’s various work arounds to temporarily clean up the data while you rebuild, and the Trakt community is usually happy to help find a solution to your use case. But throwing out personal attacks at staff (or others) doesn’t really help your case.

All I can say is thank you to everyone who has been constructive in some way.

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@Ohifriend, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply and also to attempt to explain some things from your perspective. The fact that none of the other Trakt team members have really made any effort to do so (unless I’ve missed it?), has actually really pi$$ed me off and made me even more determined to find another solution. If Trakt management are this intractable (pun intended :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) and/or unwilling to communicate with long-time users - I’ve been using Trakt for nearly 13 years since 2012 - then I simply don’t want to support the business. To be treated with contempt as a customer (intended or not) crosses a big red line in the sand for me.

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Yeah I get it. I think most, if not all, of the team are at least aware of the concerns but also we can’t all spend our day replying to every single message. Imagine even for anyone being given personal attacks based on something that was probably prepared by not just them - do you think that incentivises them, or others to reply? I’d say not really. But yes, showing a general dislike for the changes or how it’s worded is all fair play.

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Please just pass on that at the very least, Trakt users really need to be emailed about significant changes.

Many Trakt users never even visit the website or use the app etc because we’ve never needed to i.e. we only use the barebones syncing etc and nothing else. So for Trakt management to only post about these massive changes on the website has hit a lot of users hard because they (including me) only found out about the changes after the fact when there was nothing we could do. This is extremely poor communication and in reading some posts here, it seems like poor communication has been the default modus operandi for some time with Trakt. This has to improve.

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The defence is the response was pretty clear that the changes are made and you can choose to adapt, not that you’re forced to leave. And many suggestions have been made by others on workaround or solutions. Obviously people have continued to respond after personal attacks but it was an example. We have other things to work on to continue building Trakt, and can’t sit around and wait for people to change their minds.

I don’t think I ever told anyone to go someplace else, if you’re referring that to me.

Also remember that the value is your own perception - obviously many people see the value in Trakt or it wouldn’t exist, for those people nor any free users.

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