What do you mean? If you were a paid user, you would have full access to all functionality. I can understand if you say that VIP at $60 is not value for money, but other than that cannot see what you mean…
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You can also export your data through this website:
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No need to use that, we offer a direct JSON data export in your settings.
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You shouldn’t have to start paying for a service that was free 10 years ago that we made those playlists 10 years ago that didn’t have any confinements on them 10 years ago you are obviously getting kickbacks from the company for some benefit cuz nobody wants to pay for something that was a free service sorry but you sound greedy
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Do you really think costs don’t increase after 10 years? Kickbacks?? They’re a team of like 15 people and deserve to get paid for their work, not to
mention other business and server costs. If you don’t want to pay, don’t. If you want to use another service, go ahead. You expect something for free without putting any effort or funds into creating or sustaining it? That’s greediness to me.
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your statement is wrong on many levels. Services are free initially to get numbers, a company increases it’s operating costs over time and incur higher costs themselves. The cost of electricity has gone up in 10 years, Trakt staff has gone up. Saying something has to remain the same over a decade is crazy.
In that decade you must have used so much of this service.
I’m not saying $60 is worth it for what you get, but just because it’s not free does not mean it doesn’t have value. and calling a company greedy after leaching of them for a decade can label you with not so nice adjectives.
“nobody wants to pay for something that was a free service”
do you understand how business work and why they exist? Trakt isn’t a charity, If the people that used the service never had an intention of paying then why would Trakt want to carry on giving something away that costs them money? Most companies give you 7 day free trial, you had a decade LOL
also you can keep your lists by using Trakt features that cost money to make too. How ungrateful you are for all the years you’ve enjoyed work of another teams effort
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The sad thing here is that trakt has long time customer base and they aren’t really doing anything to keep that customer base.
Most companies in their position come up with clever ways to encourage users to pay for subscription. New features and enhancements that are too attractive to not pay for.
Removing and limiting features to force people to pay is only going to alienate their customer base and encourage people to take up with alternatives.
I am in that bucket. I love trakt and have used it for more time than I can remember. I have encourage many people to join it over the 10 odd years. Periodically I have reviewed the subscription and found no features in it to encourage my upgrade.
And no, I’m not in the habit of paying for services simply to support someone. I run a business and wouldn’t expect people to donate money to me simply cause it’s nice, it’s not how the world works.
Now that I am being limited I will be sadly leaving trakt as after such a long time my watchlists and collections are monstrous. My account will remain, I just won’t use it as I’ll migrate to an alternative that is chomping at the bit to gain me as a user. Pushing me notifications about trakts limitation and suggesting the switch.
Like a lot of these platforms gaining and retaining users is critical for success, monetisation is critical too, however it is far harder to gain a user base than to monetise. Monetisation can come in many forms.
I do hope trakt realise this and find a better way to monetise than at users core functionality. I would welcome an email with a reversal of this limitation before I get embedded with an alternative.
I would also welcome a subscription with additional functionality that I would find useful, that I could pay for as the subscription cost isn’t high.
I will say that trakt is a great service and was from my googling, ahead of the curve with this service
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You’re in business, and therefore you will recognise that a common strategy for any business is to clearly identify the customers they want to retain, and those that do not align with their objectives. Target segments may evolve over time.
The business will then introduce policies that ensure they retain the customers who align with those objectives, and grow that segment, whilst expecting (and encouraging) those that don’t, to drift away.
Those that find any changes disappointing very likely don’t fit into Trakt’s target segment, and therefore they will not missed if they leave.
Trakt will have real costs associated with a growing user base, and if the cost of carrying free users is becoming disproportionate, they need to do something to manage that. They would then need to rebalance their user base.
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I completely agree with OP and everyone who is complaining about this limit. I have never paid for apps that try to force their free users to move to the paid tier by removing free features. Never. It’s a terrible move.
Evernote did this too. I was happy with their free version for years. Then they started removing free features to compel us to pay, and guess what? I never did. I quit Evernote. And now I happily pay for not one but TWO alternative note-taking app that actually respect me. This is not gonna work with me.
As a general rule, when it comes to freemium, if the free version sucks, there is no way I am paying for the premium version. Every freemium app that I have paid for were apps that had great free versions that I used for years before moving to the paid tier. And they never removed free features.
TERRIBLE MOVE on Trakt’s part. They’re gonna lose me as a user unless they reverse this decision.
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Completely agree. My feelings are not too far from yours. Trakt was the best at what it does, but now it’s going downhill.
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I have experienced this with other services and they died off or are now a shell of there former experience. The restrictions on the collections has led to me stop using Trakt for anything that is locked down. I expect I will eventually stop using it all together.
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I don’t disagree with your comments at all @neilcgardner . Makes a lot of sense, and your right. Comes down to where the business was, the economic position and their ability to carry costs etc
I don’t blame trakt for their decision. I’m sure they deliberated on it and it was a hard one. Totally get this. I also recognise they probably made it because they had too.
I would simply have hoped that there was a better way and that they would of been able to find a more creative way to solve the problem. For example, like Wikipedia did back in the day and had a pop up that said… Hey we are struggling with costs we are a free platform and want to stay that way or we have plans to monetize by bringing in the following features, in the mean time please donate. They could even tie via suggestion donations to years of service. You’ve been a member for 10 years, would you like to donate $10 per year of being a member.
I would have and I would have hoped that everyone else who was free would take up the call to arms up support a company that has been good to them for so long with their free tier. I think they would have a user base that was more loyal and dedicated and bigger. They would have patched the immediate cost problem and could work towards a longer term monetisation model.
Easy for me to say…I don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. I don’t know if patching the problem is what they were looking for. I don’t know anything about what’s really going on.
Simply talking as a user that loved the service and now has an issue.
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Yes, I would have even donated a bit more on a yearly basis, if only the collection-feature would no longer be limited. I could care less on lists. The Collection-feature is key to my success-story with Trakt. With that gone, I do not want to continue, using it now as a reference site rather that a tracking-site. Please, here’s a plea to lift the limit on Collections.
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Maybe there’s a way to be creative and get around the collections limit. I don’t know what you are putting in your collection but maybe you could mark items in your collection as watched which would add them to your (unlimited) watch history. If you needed to somehow categorize or identify these, you could use the watched date/time as a code (like January 1, 2000)
A collection is a collection of shows/and episodes. I see no benefit in marking one episode as being watched, I still can’t collect.
Check out movie base. It integrates with trakt.
are you marking shows you’ve watched as collected? or are you using the collection for things you actually own as it’s intended?
if it’s the first one and you’re using a scrobbler like kodi then it’s marking stuff you watch incorrectly as collected. If you are marking things collected that you actually own, then there’s only so much you can do as others have tried to offer workarounds before, such as making lists with some of your collection. if that isn’t enough space then the only options are to look for another service or subscribe to VIP
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Elon Musk wouldn’t make the limiting better. It is your business, so free will. Charge 60, 100 or whatever you choose but cutting off what already was is a sort of useless tiranny. Of course who cares if it is only free users complaining. Potential buyers can go somewhere else. Endogamy and protectionism. It rings a bell. I got tired of expecting good things here. Closing discussions and ignoring clients won’t help either.
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People have been misusing lists (especially Collection) for a long time. I guess they don’t understand what the Watch List is for either.
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100%. I’ve seen a few with collections over 20k items. thats not feasible
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