Hello again Trakt team, this is a kind reminder that your self-imposed, yet unlawful notification window of 30 days is about to expire without you addressing the issues at hand.
Disclaimer for the mods: there might be some information specific to my subscription in this post that I hereby consent to make public for the sake of context and clarity, in case you feel the need to remove this post as you did previously.
For context, Trakt, on their website, only offers subscriptions through Credit Card or PayPal. This severely limits payment options In Europe, and can actually be considered unfair, but that’s a different topic altogether.
Since I do not have a credit card, I have to use PayPal, which used to work fine for a while. However, PayPal notoriously will limit your account for random safety reasons even when it’s baseless. For example, when your account is inactive for a while or you forget to turn off your VPN when making a payment.
In this case, PayPal will default to accepting Credit Card-only payments for subscription services with auto-renewal, such as a yearly Trakt subscription, as PayPal has to temporarily front you the money until it’s settled with your bank account for these kinds of services.
This basically renders any payment method useless unless you contact Trakt support directly and ask them to manually send them money through PayPal, after which they update your VIP status manually, which I did and they happily took my money.
So far, so good. I was a happy VIP member again…
On May 13, I had to learn through a forum post that you are going to drastically increase the VIP-pricing from $30,- to $60,- (See this post to see the questionable legality on this matter:
Upcoming VIP Renewal Pricing Changes (2) - #93 by Staalplaat)
After giving you a grace period of 2 weeks, waiting for your official, direct notification, I still had not been notified personally.
So I took to the forums and apparently, about 17% of members had not been notified either. ([Poll] Did you get an email about the upcoming VIP renewal pricing changes?)
I decided to post on the forums.
That post was deleted immediately and support contacted me through direct messaging., where they said the following:
The reason you didn’t receive an email regarding the price increase was because your situation was an edge case. In the system, your subscription was cancelled back in 2024. We didn’t send price change emails to users who wouldn’t be affected, which would include users who subscriptions had been cancelled.
I found this to be very discriminatory towards me personally, a longstanding VIP-member of 6 years that has always fulfilled their contractual obligations towards you. In addition, as a citizen of the EU, I have the explicit right to cancel any auto-renewal subscription service because of personal preferences towards manual subscriptions - a given right of choice in the EU - without you discriminating against me whether subscriptions are active, cancelled, manually renewed, or set to auto-renewal, for the complete duration of the contract, as well as regarding me as a full VIP member with the exact same rights as any other VIP member; ie, notifying me within 30 days of any material change to the price of your service, which you have failed to do.
In your own Terms of Use, (Terms of Use - Trakt), you state the following:
“We will give you at least 30 days’ notice prior to a change in price or your subscription.”
This obligation applies to all subscribers, regardless of whether they use auto-renewal or manual renewal methods. Therefore, Trakt is required to provide at least 30 days’ notice of any price changes to all subscribers, without discrimination based on payment or renewal preferences.
Since you have failed to provide notice to all subscribers, as seemingly 17% of subscribers report not being notified - a direct choice made by you, as stated by customer support - the June 12 date simply cannot be viable and is in clear violation of your own Terms of Use.
Bearing in mind all the issues brought to light on this forum thread, and the complete lack of any accountability by you, how can you even continue with the implementation of this unlawful price increase debacle.
Please address all the issues above, so we can be transparently informed about how Trakt intends to proceed in a lawful and fair manner. It is only reasonable to expect that Trakt, as a company that relies on the trust and loyalty of its user base, honors its own Terms of Use and provides equal treatment to all VIP members, regardless of whether their subscriptions are active, manually renewed, or managed through auto-renewal.
I kindly request that you publish an official and public statement clarifying your legal basis for these price increases, how you intend to reconcile the failure to properly notify all affected users, and whether you plan to uphold prior commitments made by Trakt leadership regarding grandfathered pricing.
Without such clarity, many long-standing supporters, myself included, are left in the dark, questioning the trustworthiness of a service we have supported and promoted for years.