The people I’m talking about had years. A new member can have time. They get to use the free tier as long as they like. Some of those people will become VIP.
Now this part was poorly done.
To keep Trakt financially stable for into the future like Justin said. Beyond that I don’t know. But I’m willing to be you don’t either. 
I feel for you. This could’ve easily been me missing the boat 9 years ago. I would’ve paid the $60.
This make no sense to me. They do need to fix that!
I just started using Trakt, and as soon as I get there this happens, if I had known before I wouldn’t have even started, and to think that I also wanted to become a VIP, not at these prices though, it costs me more to mark things down than to watch them, it doesn’t make sense
If it was $30 a year I’d already be a VIP by now
Yeah, I didn’t receive an email either. 
It doesn’t affect you because you do not use lists or collections or shared lists. However, many other VIP users do use those shared lists. So, now the free users who maintain those shared lists can no longer contribute. The VIP users who valued those lists will have less reason to continue paying for VIP. This may damage Trakt’s revenue stream, and in the worst case, fail the business.
$5 a month is a ripoff for a service you use every day?
VIP on SIMKL is $70 a year, if people are going to compare. Personally I don’t collect, don’t use lists to decide what to watch, but find tremendous value in TRAKT so I pay for VIP.
I’d fully support some kind of mid-level account that allows people the functions they want, which seems to be focused on lists, even though it doesn’t benefit me personally. I’d rather see people stay than move to inferior services
Pricing based on local markets makes 100% sense. Living in Canada I have to pay $7.99 before taxes and a total of $9.99 after taxes!
With this on mind, it doesn’t make sense for me to pay $100 per year just to track my shows and movies!
I do want to keep supporting you guys. I doubt I will be able to do so though for this price.
It is, but they also have a mid tier PRO as well which is only $35 a year, and covers unlimited lists etc. This is what some are pushing for on here - a cut down inbetween service at a cut down price for those that won’t use all the bells and whistles.
VIP lifetime is only $149 - one payment and you are done.
FWIW, I have already tried SIMKL and find it is lacking, so I won’t be paying for that either. I really wanted to like it, especially after all the drama and subterfuge around here lately, but nothing beats Trakt, sadly. 
Same. I gave it a look, but it just doesn’t work as cleanly as Trakt, is rather ugly to look at, and is not easy to navigate. I do like the idea of a mid-level type account focused on lists, etc. Seems that would be a fair compromise and keep the community intact.
In my case, I signed up for trakt when I was still a teenager. I only got my first job after graduating last year and my intention was very much to upgrade to VIP. Last I had checked, there were still the 30€ VIP and 60€ VIP EP tiers. Then I go to the VIP page only to find out that the prices had been raised with no warning anywhere on the website or app, nor on Mastodon or Twitter (where I also follow them for updates). I still hoped there was going to be a Black Friday deal too, but no dice. At least I’m thankful for the GDPR so that I can extract my list data out and probably just manage it manually, because if 30€ was manageable, even if stretching my budget, 60€ is way too much for me.
EDIT: Honestly I’d be content with a VIP Basic/Lite tier that would increase the list limits a bit above the free ones, then keep all the other stuff in the premium VIP tier.
Exactly. Too little time to search on my own, and now you are depriving us of the lists we used.
@justin I use trakt on my kodi box to keep track of where I am in TV series I watch. these changes have caused me to deauthorize trakt in the addons i use to do so, and suddenly, my kodi box is so much more responsive, meaning NOT using trakt has given my client a whole new lease on life. I’m still using the simkl scrobbling ability within the addon, as well as TMDb, but it seems like the trakt integration was adding bloat or was poorly integrated; perhaps the dev of my main addon didn’t have access to the same resources as the competition provides. whatever the case may be, I’m likely leaving, and this is my rationale, for your consideration.
Thanks, and best of luck for continued success
I think it might be too late. For Trakt to drastically reduce the Free tier features and then to add a Standard tier for even $10/year for users to get those features back would be a serious bait-and-switch disaster.
It’s moot anyway. @justin has made the corporate position clear. I do not think they will backtrack like they did in May 2022.
I’ve been a user for over 11 years. Fortunately, Showly–the third-party Android app I use to sync with Trakt–works just fine without Trakt as a backstop. The developer also just added an Export/Import feature. (Quite timely!)
That’s a very pessimistic way to look at things. It’s complicated but free users affect paid users in such services.
Let’s take a few hypothetical scenario.
If 1 out of ever 10 new users get VIP. If free users are dissatisfied with the offering then there are less new users in a period. If monthly new users is 10,000 then 1000 will get VIP but if that reduces to 5,000 then there’s a 50% loss of new VIP users.
If 2-3 out of every 10 new users get VIP after 1 year, 2year, etc. The result will be similar.
If old users leave cause the features they relied on are removed, then there will be a domino effect towards paid users as well. Like lower ad-revenue, lower bug-fixes, lower updates to TV & Movie pages, less reviews, lists and ratings. It could get harder to sustain the project in the long run.
Of course the solution is competitive pricing. I joined Trakt literally a month ago, $60/year was out of the question but I realised the India specific playstore plan is $21.
But that’s still alot considering in India-
Paying more for a service to track streaming services that cost less seems awful. After USA, India has the largest Prime and Disney+ users. Lower price leads to more users which leads to more revenue. Doesn’t matter if you compare the lowest plans offered by each or the highest, Netflix is losing in revenue. Prime and Disney are winning in India because they know there is strength in numbers.
As people get more involved with streaming, its only wiser to have competitive plans to drive tons of users to your service that want to keep track of everything.
Yeah, someone will probably take over if they’re valued that much 
there’s probably already lots of copies 
Still a pretty sad practice, you can’t prevent people from turning on privacy unless they pay or roll over. Makes you wonder what else they do with your privacy.
This for me is such a good explanation and exactly the current reality 
i work for an online platform and putting cost higher 100% impacts conversion rate.
A few things goes into why this is the case but perceive value is always number one. If you compare the cost of a streaming platform vs the cost of Trakt VIP for a year you quickly see that their values is significantly different, although these service are ultimately connected. Add the rising cost of streaming and of day to day life, and you will see that this already significantly temper with the conversion rate of free to VIP since Trakt is a sort of addon service for movie enthusiasts. So yes putting the cost higher and forcing users to now force subscribe to continue using the service the same way they did before will push people to leave and ultimately will affect VIP if this cause cost and functionality issue for everyone.
Even more, if you consider alternative that exist which, don’t get me wrong, are not better than Trakt, but may do things differently enough to interest people.
I am happy to see some VIP saying they are happy to pay for their membership. I think its important to see that some people are happy with their membership! That being said I really don’t think that the frustration people have comes from only having to become a VIP but more the fact that the process was badly done, there exist not option for membership that catter to a wider range of people and finally that people legit can’t use the app the same way they did before.
Absolutely! Look at Twit.tv (a podcast network). They say “only” about 5% (IIRC) of listeners are subscribers. They are also quick to say that it’s totally fine. Partly, that’s because they run a few ads to the free listeners, but it’s also because they know the free listeners drive more listeners (and new subscribers) through recommendations.
I don’t think Trakt has considered the knock-on effects of this decision.
Every time that Justin keep saying “Moving forward”, is like hell to me. OK? “Future” stop thinking in the future and press attention to the PRESENT, NOW or NEVER. Because we are moving really fast. Looks like that the loyalty that the free users did to Trakt all this years (decades), was just for nothing. OK, as you wish. You can build something good in time, but you can also destroyed really fast.
Trakt is a business and thus increased revenue means more cool stuff we can build and more cool people we can hire to build it. Perhaps my wording was weird, but there seemed to be an incorrect narrative on here and reddit that we’re struggling financially.
You are probably right, but we prefer to not make our members and their data into a product.
This was actually a bug with the collection check and the 100 limit has been corrected to use shows + movies (not episodes).
The list stats were pulled directly from our database for active users, it wasn’t a poll or survey.
Any user who used Trakt in the last 3 months is what we consider active for the list stats I mentioned above. Website or API doesn’t matter since we’re looking at the actual data.
Because ads suck, especially programmatic ones. In general the ads were confusing and deceptive and we decided to move away from that revenue stream.
People just don’t think about it. We don’t want to be in the game of selling user data or working with those type of retargeting companies.
There was a lot more chatter on reddit about that, but I posted the same reply in both places.
@justin - Hopefully the Data issue can be put to bed - but will you please give some consideration to thinking again about the 100 max items in 2 lists - This won’t just affect ‘free’ users, but also VIP’s who use a list a free user has created. These free users help the community grow and whilst those free user lists could be the ones you note as being in the % figures you quoted, they’re performing a great service and help make Trakt what it is. I would hate to see so many free users jump ship because they’re being prevented from having 100+ items in a list, as that has that knock on effect of harming the community and VIP users who use their lists.
For me, I’ve supported VIP for 7 years and will continue to do so as it helps everyone, not just me and supports the efforts of the Developers behind the scenes continue to grow and provide the service.
I knew (or assumed) that but I was referring to the part bolded here by me:
Judging by what I found since posting, I imagine it might just be about the email sent to users who have lists (not Watchlist) larger than 100 items to inform them that they may need to upgrade to VIP to continue growing their list but I’m not sure how that helped you test your theories so perhaps there was more to it than that.