Trakt has been very useful since I joined back in 2014, shame I might not be able to make use of it going forward 
Collected items: 22100 / 22212. Now I can’t add to that as it is slightly over the new limit of 100.
Thanks for just over 9 years of good service at least.
Edit: 34,730 total collected items, 68% watched.
What was the previous limit for lists?
I want to give a peak behind the scenes and offer additional info related to the recent changes. Trakt is a small business, and we make decisions to help grow Trakt and remain sustainable for the long haul. Trakt has been around for 15 years and we want it to exist another 15+.
Trakt’s revenue is all from VIP memberships. I’ve seen a big misconception saying we sell user data. We don’t and its listed right up top in our privacy policy and I added this to the VIP page too. Many similar sites do in fact sell your user data and build their entire product around it. At Trakt, you are not the product.
As of several months ago, we don’t serve any 3rd party ads and therefore have no ad revenue. The ad units you see on the website and mobile apps are in house ads, typically for Trakt VIP. 3rd party ads really suck and we determined the overall Trakt experience was more important than ad revenue.
We currently have 10 full time and 2 part employees. VIP revenue pays our salaries and also the server costs. The infrastructure cost required to run Trakt is quite large.
I’ve also seen many mentions that we don’t allow your data to be downloaded, which isn’t true. The free Trakt API has always been available to get all of your data. There are also many 3rd party tools built on top of the Trakt API to help with this. VIPs get the extra convenience of automatic backups, CSV exports, and RSS feeds. GDPR requests are handled through support and we send you a zip with JSON files for all data in your account.
I added a new Data Export option, which is available starting today for all members. This is essentially a self service GDPR request. You can request your export every 7 days, and we’ll automatically email you the zip file. We limit the frequency since it takes some server effort to produce this export.
I will admit the initial announcement was too focused on the new free features while downplaying the limits too much. When making the decision to lower the limits, we ran the percentages and also sent out an email in December to test our theories. Here are some numbers based on our active members:
Here are a few other notes for common comments I’ve been seeing.
After taking in the feedback, there are some good ideas in the forum and reddit comments that deserve a deeper dive. We will explore some these as we plan future updates. For example, expanding our regional pricing beyond India and Brazil to be more global makes a lot of sense. Figuring out something for the popular, free lists makes sense. We know the list limits suck for some of you, but we’re trying to normalize our features with all of the above in mind.
If this is the case, why put the squeeze on free users with these sharply reduced list/collection limits?
Why was it a big deal to remove “duplicate plays” months ago?
A healthy company doesn’t need to worry about a few hundred (or a few hundred thousand) extra rows in a database.
Well done for ruining what was once a good community. You made a great service, but you appear to have a poor outlook on your business and not really taken into account how it’s the community that keep you relevant. If your pricing structure wasn’t ludicrous and frankly outdated many people wouldn’t feel too bitter about this.
Bottlenecking people who already exceeded limits is an extremely poor move. Grandfathering existing users who have been with your service from the start is what someone educated in business would likely do, yet you’ve alienated a lot of people and made using the service almost impossible in some cases.
Those 2.9% that you say have lists with over 100 items likely equate to the majority of the popular lists out there. You can’t count every single user subscribed to your service in this because it’s likely only a small % actually contribute, the small % that you’ve alienated causing the community to suffer.
Judging by the comments in this thread, I start to (well, not necessarily start now, cause I was under the impression for a long time) believe that the tech companies took a great decision in selling people’s data (probably without the majority even knowing or actually understanding this!) and monetising over ads rather than ask for subscriptions.
In simpler terms, I think the average user would prefer to click “Accept all” without even knowing what he or she accepted, see a few ads, maybe have its data sent to advertising profilers for further tailoring across other websites and enjoy 1000 list items on Trakt. All of that instead of paying 5 bucks for it monthly.
I’m not here to give any advice (cause I’m definitely not entitled to), but once again - after reading the comments in this thread - maybe @justin you can start considering making money the “dirty” way in the business (by profiling customers and selling ads) 
And I’m saying this as a VIP who had auto-renewal on, who’s happy with the old $30 subscription tier and who’s going to keep paying and supporting Trakt going forward.
In their collection? Not watchlist or separate lists, their actual collection?
I can understand not needing more than 100 in a watchlist to a degree, so long as it doesn’t count a series or show as each individual episode it’s still very usable.
But a collection mainly just grows slowly, and 100 (especially counting individual episodes) makes the collection feature defunct, doesn’t it? For example, if you have the complete collection of The Office you’ve almost doubled that….
95%-97% of users don’t keep anything? And just stream…?
It’s a shame, having my collection viewable away from home has been nice, but not worth $60 a year. I’d still keep it for release updates etc. but my interaction with the app would be limited to that I guess. until I eventually find something that does both again.
Came here 3 years ago for the collection feature. As I am well over 100, the loss of that functionality completely shuts me down.
I also agree that it just isn’t worth $60 a year for the rest of my life. Not to mention it can go up at anytime or even just close up shop any day with no notice…
Hey @justin, I think as most people, I appreciate that you are taking the time to answer!
I think most people agree that Trakt requires monetization. Like all businesses, you have cost and requires monetization to makie it viable.
That being said most of the issue people are having is the rugged pull that was done where you mentioned potential changes and limitations that would not affect watchlist and collection, but then made the change for these list as well. 100 item on a watchlist is really nothing, just taking into account the sheer number of anime release per season. Include movies and tv shows, most people will go throught this quickly. 5.8% having this amount of item seems very odd to me.
Alternatively, if monetization is the issue than I would greatly recommend that you had alternatives way for us to help. Mainly please reconsider the VIP price which doubled in price. 60 USD is an insane amount of money for a tracking service. Its not simply a question of adjusting base on currency but also justifying the price people pay. Create new tier with lower cost, add more options for VIP, and etc, but something need to be done regarding this if the main issue for this changes is monetization. The price is too steep and now you are pushing away potential conversations to pay user that would have happened if there was better pricing option.
Agreed. I wonder who the poll was sent out to.
I personally mostly use Trakt for the watchlists (and for following curated user lists). Just need a way to keep track of what has been recommended to me over the years.
The other features I don’t need, and I expect most free users (not the ones polled apparently) are not using enough features for $60 USD to be justifiable. To be expected to suddenly start paying that much to continue adding items to my watchlists strikes me as absurd, especially when I believe it was originally said that existing lists would not be affected, but now they are.
It must be considered that not everyone lives in the US. $60 USD is quite a lot in certain countries so I am glad regional pricing is being considered but also tiered pricing is a must. This all or (basically) nothing approach is far too polarising and completely illogical.
What constitutes an “active member”? What’s the median? The average? Mode? I mean, let’s dig into the stats because there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” 
Also, if so few users have more than 100 items and 2 lists, why impose such harsh limits on those few users who were already limited to 1,000 or 2,000?
We don’t have 3rd party ads
Why not? i have adblock installed, so does everyone, but i disabled specifically on Trakt because i think you guys do a great job and deserve ad revenue, and i would very much prefer doing this than being forced to pay a monthly fee. Ads are such a basic thing and if not intrusive into the website layout, nobody will care about. @pmndaniel7 is right, i mean, people say they like privacy and companies will say they can protect user data, but the truth is that we use Google everyday and our data is already sold and done for.
Yikes, so the change is definitely pretty dramatic and really non-sensical because I don’t think it will have the intended effect of driving people to subscribe to VIP. Would have made a lot more sense to move all free users to the previous new member limit instead of such a huge dramatic drop if they were seriously in need of changing the limits. The dramatic change may very well hurt VIP members too, simply by its negative impact on the overall community and userbase.
If the usage was as low as they claim across the board, then having higher limits wouldn’t really hurt them since only the most active free users would even be close to the previous limits and those would be the most impacted by the current limits. These active free users are a core part of the site besides the VIP members, since active users makes the whole platform better.
There are alternative options for tracking a watchlist, so they have to realize that while they are the top pick at the moment, it doesn’t take a lot for the tides to turn. Once there is a big enough migration, they won’t be able to stop the bleeding.
Far better to invest in improving VIP without gimping free users. This would be the best way to incentivize more people to subscribe. I think $60 is far too much for the limited features they do offer and I think that is really what the issue is. If they are set on the $60 price point and not a more tiered pricing structure, then they are in trouble
I imagine this is the kind of data most people wouldn’t be bothered by if it was sold. Could be just for free users and now that gives another potential value add for switching to VIP for people who are privacy conscious.
“We are committed to maintaining a robust and efficient service for everyone, with fair usage limits.” How is this fair?? The new limits placed on free members is ridiculous. I loved this site because it was an easy way for me to keep track of all the movies and tv shows I wanted to watch while keeping track of what I have already watched. It was nice to know where I left off in shows and when new episodes were airing. Now, the site is basically useless to me. My “shows to watch” and “movies to watch” lists both have over 100 items so I can’t add anything new. I have more than two lists so can’t even create a new shows/movies to watch list. I joined this past year and spent a lot of time marking items as watched and making my lists. Seems like it was a huge waste of time and need to do it all over again on a new site.
Following the changes I’ve discovered I’m reliant on features now paywalled.
However, the $60/year VIP price is way too much.
I’d be totally happy with $30 to be honest.
I wasn’t even aware of the price increases otherwise I would have subscribed at $30 for life.
Sadly I think I’m going to explore other more competitively priced services.
Hello, it’s me! I don’t think it’s as uncommon as you think it might be.
Who still collects DVD, Blu-rays or whatever new media type there might be? I haven’t met them.
Wait, the collection on Trakt does not limit what you can stream or watch through a media center or whatever? You media center content just wouldn’t be pushed as collected on Trakt anymore. Your scrobbles will still go through as check-ins? You can still watch your content anywhere, everywhere (all at once 
)
For the first time in forever I would be totally and utterly grossed out by Trakt. There’s already too much “friend politics” on online communities. Don’t need that happening on Trakt. (I don’t know if friend politics is a word. But it is in Dutch)
I haven’t seen any mail with a polls or questionary. But a lot of my mails get treated as spam nowadays, ugh.
I’m not against that. I’m against trakt giving them stuff other people pay for and playing favorites like that.
Great. I now don’t have media library. I can’t even upgrade to vip because of where I live. Limiting collection just breaks all the experience. I was making my library for 6 years with you service. Sad outcome.
