Hello Trakt team. For starters I would like to say I’m happy paying $30 a year for Trakt. I’m part of the addons community in Kodi and have seen quite a few people unable to pay the $60/y for Kodi. Work from some addon devs like Umbrella_dev is underway to figure out how to bring the functionality inhouse.
Most people just want to have less than 10 lists of their movies/shows. I don’t have the data of how much storage costs for storing that data but asking Chatgpt I get below 32GB.
But I don’t think you create multiple copies of the metadata for each person , so for Trakt it won’t be close to that figure for each user? (sorry for my ignorance)
So I wanted to approach the team here at Trakt to come up with a solution that allows people to subscribe to trakt but at a reduced price as long as Trakt can reduce it’s overhead and I think I have.
Right now if an addon access’s Trakt List, then depending on how many items in a list, many hundreds of API calls are probably made to retrieve the metadata then it’s stored in cache. This happens on each time we load a list. Instead what if the addon makes one API call initially, it checks if the list was changed from previously, if it has it loads all the metadata but stores it in local storage that would be encrypted so a user can’t download all the metadata. If a list hasn’t changed then we retrieve the metadata from local storage device.
You should have data to show how many times a list changed for your users, I’d assume mostly lists don’t change much. If a user doesn’t change their list and access 10 lists a day, that’s max 10 API calls to trakt. The benefit for the user might also be much faster loading times since we are using local storage. The load on Trakt will be heavily reduced.
I’m not a dev so I don’t know how this will work. But now your overhead is reduced for people wanting to access through kodi and you are able to charge less, thus have a massive influx of subscribers. If you could charge $2/m, then I would assume you have 1000’s more wanting to subscribe. This could literally be for Kodi/Stremio subscription . A special subscription just for this kind of service, anyone signing up has to have this local encrypted storage on their device. Maybe you could work with Kodi addon developers to understand how this could be worked.
You’ll get subscription from people that otherwise wouldn’t have subscribed and if it’s achieved to be able to have our own list without a cloud service like trakt then users will use that instead, over the long term I see an increase in people unsubscribing. We just like to hold our lists and a nice interface to create our trakt lists.
Trakt is happier and KODI community is happier. I would love your thoughts on this, thanks for your consideration
“keep the cost of VIP and charge $2 for api access to modify lists, the way MDBList does.”
I think an open dialogue with potential customers could be good?
Trakt is a great service, has much more than just lists. what needs to change so you can keep revenue as is but charge a cheaper price which will have a net positive for revenue after costs? Kodi has a big userbase so I hope you consider a solution that is attracting for the community. thanks
Correct me if I’m wrong, but reading through the Trakt API documentation, when a call to get a user’s list is made, the API might already returns a property that can be used, updated_on?(Trakt API · Apiary).
If you have internally cached when the last access was successful, you can easily make the check yourself to see if it was changed or not. Unless this property only applies to the actual list itself, such as title and settings, if so, then disregard anything I’ve said above.
hey thanks for that information, I’m not a developer and reading what you wrote seems like addons can easily do this but I wasn’t clear maybe in my post.
Trakt had to raise th prices because of costs. Each time a list is opened in an application, Trakt understands many hundreds of API calls will be made to get all the metadata. what if Trakt knew that, that could be reduced to a single API call. I’ve not updated my lists in 4 months. If I access 20 lists a day that’s 20 API calls it would have done to see nothing has been updated hence fetch from my own local storage. Each API call might have minuts between them because once a list is loaded you won’t go to a new list that quickly.
So basically this reduces cost significantly. If you added 500 more members and each loaded a list every minute but it was not needing to refresh, this is almost the same person as loading 1 list needed to be refreshed with 1000 items. something like that.
since their costs are lower, they can reduce the price and get more people to subscribe.
So my request is both for figuring out if this could be done, and if it can be done, will trakt be willing to reduce the price. because even if an addon developer implemented this. unsubscribed people can’t work with 2 lists and 100 items each.
I’m happy with my subscription , just would like more happy people to be able to enjoy the great service Trakt is.