As mentioned in another post, I’m on the fence on whether or not I will keep the 2 VIP subscriptions in my household.
For me, last.fm is a good comparison to trakt. Both services allow you to keep track of media you “consume”, and allow you to discover something new. For me, last fm does for music what trakt does for movies and tv.
I’ve been a VIP subscriber to trakt for nearly 5 years, I’ve been a PRO subscriber to last.fm for only 1 year. My last.fm subscription costs me €50/year. (Apparently last.fm increased their PRO pricing last year just before I signed up from €30 to €50. Also a substantial increase, but still less than the increase of trakt pricing) I was not aware of the old price so only looked at the cost of €50/year when signing up. Considering that music is more important to me than movies and TV, the price seemed acceptable compared to the $30 I was paying for trakt. (For comparison, I had approximately 32000 scrobbles on last.fm in the last year, compared to 1150 plays on trakt)
Trakt is now doubling its VIP price. This is being justified as follows:
While I understand that expenses have increased as a result of inflation and an increase of the subscription could be justified, I am more difficulty understanding the aspect of increased load. Compared to last.fm, I would think that the load per user on trakt is substantially less. I my case about 27x less! Where does the increased load come from? Would this primarily not be the result of having more users? Meaning more income? So this should not affect pricing per user. Unless of course you are not properly monetizing users in the free tier and are looking to VIP users to fill the hole. This litteraly sounds like a double or nothing bet.
In the end, it is up to everyone to decide for themselves whether or not a product or service is worth its price. What is acceptable for some might not be acceptable for others. In my specific case, it could mean that my wife will keep a VIP subscription, but I might not as movies and tv are more important for her than for me.