Impressive, @marius. Now it’s not feasible to grandfather accounts and the costs doubled in a year?
Not very consistent with the messaging we received over the past year, about all the supposed success.
Nevermind though, perhaps the cost increases and resulting higher prices are justified. But there is no denying that Trakt is doing a horrible horrible job justifying these price jumps to us.
What was the last feature introduced, that is widely registered an improvement? Not to mention a must have.
The app was the only major new thing in the past five years, that I remember. And while it has its advantages, it still can’t fully compete with all the features of the website.
And what else did we get? How many of us do really rely on that automatic watched content logging?
Maybe it would have been kind of smart to have something to show off before you decide to milk your established customers more.
But instead, all we got were some cryptic suggestions about what might come somewhere down the line. Which, by our experience in the past years, might turn out to be rather underwhelming. If not even a complete waste of time and money. Or its stuff that only is relevant for a minority of users.
And the best part is: This wasn’t part of the announcement to justify the price increase. It’s the lame attempt to fix the mess, days later.
I’m less and less convinced that Trakt is able to make decisions that improve the experience for us. And that isn’t the best basis to convince me to pay twice as much.
Yeah, what the hell is that post even implying, has @justin lost control of the company? Who is making these decisions? I didn’t think that they were going to sell the company, but it becoming more likely that they are corporatizing and/or getting acquired by someone?
Their stupid cop-out that the price is doubling because of the extra stuff they now have to pay for, or because of their baffling choice in adding features which is probably the reason..
Get rid of all the useless shit they made in the past year, Younify whatever that was supposed to be and Trakt Lite, Literally nobody asked for this, splitting your site makes absolutely zero sense.
i just read that post, i’m still on the non cancel part for my own reasons, which mainly is the person called Justin. 12 years member 11 vip i have changed a lot of bugs and mails with justin in v1 before v2 and this is firghting me the most
How is this even possible ? is he be held hostage ? is he ok ? really no response from him is what makes me worry that someone has taken over and after 6 months they will take the money and to to Maldives or something. If Justin is not the decision maker who is ?
I remember when trakt started and Justin struggled to keep up with demand so I happily started VIP 13 years ago. I missed OG by a week or two because I had to setup a credit card first I did it to support him and the vision. But it now does feel like the company is no longer following his or even the OG VIPs vision. I wonder who is making the decisions too. But if the company itself doesn’t support Justin then canceling might be a way to show them that he was right about that.
Currently it feels like the Trakt team is exploring the most niche and unnecessary options to “improve” and expects us to bankroll all their ideas without questioning them.
They seriously need some reasonable process to determine what we want or appreciate. Whatever they currently use for their decision making process, it’s … lacking.
This is not a fair comparison putting side-by-side a small business with a big corporation that has hundreds of millions of paid subscribers. Amazon makes money from people buying more stuff with Prime deliveries, not from streaming. Most streaming services are not even profitable, but they can afford to subsidize the content for user growth and then monetize user data.
And from the consumer standpoint, this is not a cheap hobby. If you want to watch legally then you have to subscribe to 5-10 streaming services that will cost more than $100/month. Paying another $5/month to keep track of what you’re watching and manage all this fragmentation is a relatively small increase.
If you want to compare with other similar subscription plans, please take a look at the price of premium podcast for example Downstream+ - Relay
Well, money is limited. And if a user tells you he thinks that his money is better spent on another streaming service with content instead of the tracking site to see what he already watched then this is a valid point. How are you comparing to a streaming library. Do you really think that big corporations don’t have a lot of costs for their services, servers etc? Streaming and hosting video content is so much more traffic, storage cost and servers than trakt. If you find it unfair that trakt is a small business with limited money then don’t try to make big corporation features that you can’t handle and pay for. People are voting with their wallet and telling you that they don’t see the value in 60$ a year. But you don’t seem to listen to that feedback and are not trying to understand them.
Is this a joke? My primary reason to use Trakt is exactly the opposite of what you describe. I only subscribe two streaming services at a time and switch them from time to time.
And I use Trakt to identify the best content I’ve been missing out, when I resubscribe to a streaming service. A job that Trakt is doing worse than before, after you guys decided to drop the “last year” filter option.
But thank you for illustrating how you don’t even understand how some of us use Trakt. It explains a lot.
And instead it’s a sensible comparison because Trakt basically acts as a companion to those services, and it can’t cost the same or nearly the same.
Do these companies have much more money? Yes, true. But they also have enormously higher costs, each individual film and episode costing millions of dollars and the work of thousands of people.
Making ends meet is the company’s job, not the customer’s, not my problem. The fact remains that, from my perspective as a consumer, I can’t pay to keep track of what movies I’ve watched any more than I pay the people who make those movies.
You have no idea what other legal options are, do you? What about cinema? DVDs or Blu-rays - ever heard of them? Even lots of freely available content… Please just stop making silly excuses without doing any prior research before making any impacting decisions
am sorry but are the site serious on this ? we get a reply from someone with no valid credit status on the site stating in defence of the increase the suibscription costs of all streaming services?
Do you know the apple vs oranges saying ?
I think most users will decide on the price/value ratio; not on whether it’s a small business or big corporation providing the service.
And if they do care about the company (as many VIPs have posted here), they might no longer do that in the case of Trakt, due to all the things Trakt did over the last year.
I bet its probably more of the lines that they want it as a PWA so then development resource is only targeted at that, but the fact they say more apps etc i am unsure.
But they say one thing and do another which is clearly well known here.
This comment proves you don’t understand your userbase at all.
You can legally watch content from multiple streaming services by subscribing to 1 or 2 at a time depending on what shows and movies you want to watch at that point. There is also physical media, digital media that has been purchased…
Regardless of what content is being watched from whichever sources, Trakt is essentially a nice GUI for lists. Lists of content we want to watch, lists of content we have watched. It’s a completely replaceable service.
The way that you have approached the price increases, the awful attempts at justifying the increases, and the outright lies told about grandfathered users show that Trakt is not the company it used to be. Even if the service was worth $60/year, you’re proving the be a company that doesn’t deserve the money.
This level of disrespect and poor customer relations management is a long long way from what we have previously experienced and I feel bad for Justin as he is the only reason I was happy to pay for VIP. He has always been a perfect example for how founders and developers can engage with, and support their users
It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point they then create their own service like this and piggyback off say Pluto or Samsung TV Plus and market it like Trakt TV+
But I mean the options are vast, even Disney+ at the entry level is cheaper than Trakt, streaming service vs a streaming tracker.
Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s one above Justin now and calls the final shots, it just sounds like he has either been shifted aside or stepped down and someone else has come in and assumed how this platform works and not how their users including paying users (that allow staff roles at Trakt to exist), and how we use it.
Eh, that’s kind of a disingenuous argument. At least I don’t know a single person who subscribes to every available streaming service all at once. Perhaps we come from entirely different kinds of economical and social circles, but where I come from everyone only subscribes to a single service and occasionally switches to another.
Also, the hobby doesn’t have to be quite as expensive as you make it out to be, like e.g. one can just wait for a round of discounted subscriptions; most subscription services have the occasional promo event where they offer, say, 50% off the normal subscription cost for 3 months – all you need is some patience as you wait for the next such event. But that’s not all! For $60 you can e.g. find a cardboard box absolutely chock full of second-hand DVDs on various flea markets and Craigslist-equivalents. There certainly are ways of saving some money here and there, even with this hobby.
“Relatively” is a good word here, but relative to what? You’re comparing to this supposed scenario where one subscribes to every available streaming service, but what if the comparison was e.g. to one’s income? There are a lot of people who don’t get paid well or who are even entirely unemployed, for example, and for them that $5 may be a very different value than it is to you.
Another comparison we could make is the value proposition: I, for example, really only use Trakt for tracking what I’ve watched and for finding new stuff to watch. That’s…not a lot. Compare that to someone who uses most if not even all the features Trakt offers them – the relative value of that $5 is entirely different for me and them even on just the value proposition basis.
I did it to support him and the vision. But it now does feel like the company is no longer following his or even the OG VIPs vision. I wonder who is making the decisions too. But if the company itself doesn’t support Justin then canceling might be a way to show them that he was right about that.