Halfway through Monday and no further response.
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Totally fair point — 70€ for one year of Simkl VIP does sound steep if you’re outside their targeted USD pricing region. That said, I ended up going with their $149 Lifetime VIP deal a couple days ago — mostly because after what just happened here with Trakt, I’ve realized any recurring subscription feels fragile now, even when it’s “grandfathered.”
And yeah, I get that lifetime deals can vanish too, but at least with Simkl I know I’ve paid once and don’t need to re-evaluate my subscription every year. Add to that their referral perk (1 free VIP year for each signup using your link) and their dev team actually engaging in feedback, and it starts to feel like a platform worth trying — at least for now.
Still rooting for Trakt to course-correct, but actions (or lack of them) are speaking louder than words lately.
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Well you know they’re going to have an influx of funding real soon, haha.
Plenty of VIP’s from here there already, $$ to develop.
Lmfao this is absolutely hilarious to me…
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Yeah… I start to see what you mean… I just registered and it took roundabout <10 minutes to set up my account, connect my streaming services to the automatic scrobbling, import all trakt data (without any missing items!) and feel familiar with the frontend. Besides, the pages are loading incredibly fast, and the automatic scrobbling of Netflix works like a charm…
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Thx for your response
If only SIMKL would only fix their privacy issues. Being able to see someone’s profile by their email is such a disaster waiting to happen. A scraper could literally use email list (or even brute force) to get user profiles and sell the data (or who nows if worse).
They did mention on their Discord server recently that they might double the lifetime price soon (yes, also a 100% raise!), because they have an unusual high number of people (former Trakt users?) choosing that option instead of a subscription…
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Each user gets a unique ID; not even a username.
How is that coupled to an email address?
In the Search Bar under Users, if you search for an email address, the profile linked to that email will be shown. You don’t even need to have an account to be able to search random email address linked profiles. Easy job for a bot to steal profile data mapped to emails.
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The same one that takes a subscription or 20day waiting period for you to be able to turn on? Well, even then your Display Name would be scraped and Profile ID will be associated with your email.
And Google and AD companies are thankful for it, but you gotta hope there are no other 3rd party bad actors who misuse the data some other way.
Gotta appreciate Trakt for doing so much better on privacy issues.
Just tested this myself: In a browser I wasn’t logged into, I searched for both my known username and a known email on Simkl’s user search, and both returned matching profiles. However, since my privacy settings are locked down, anyone clicking my profile just sees a generic message saying the account is private. Nothing else is exposed.
That said, I get the concern. It probably wouldn’t take much effort for a bot to scrape the directory and probe for public profiles tied to emails. The good news is that Simkl does give us fine-grained privacy controls — you can hide your profile, reviews, watch history, and more if you take a moment to configure the settings.
Still, the fact that email-based search is even possible without being logged in is a fair criticism. Hopefully they tighten that up.
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Anyone else spot that @justin has made his profile private as of today, strange as I was refreshing it regularly to see if he would post a response on the current debacle
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Not even listed on their LinkedIn People page.
At this point, it’s clear that Trakt is prepping for an acquisition by trying to increase their ARR in order to increase their valuation. Apps, Lite, Younify integration, and the rebrand all cost lots of money that they probably had to get VC funding for.
I think the play here is hoping that the majority of their VIP members don’t read their TOS or emails and just auto renew at the new price, not noticing until a month or two later when their get their credit card bill, at which point it’ll be too late for them.
According to Crunch Base Trakt hit 2M users in 2016. Who knows how many they’re at now or how large their VIP base is. Losing 700 VIPs could just end up being a Blip for them. The apps and Younify seem to be expenses incurred to increase the amount of user data they have — where the real money is.
If you’re in the EU, you might consider a GDPR removal request as you leave the building.
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Saw Justin’s profile pic in Latest and thought he said something but nope just pinned the announcement globally and changed the date to June 12.
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Unsurprisingly, that happened shortly after PC was acquired by Automattic. Fortunately, I was one of the Premium members grandfathered in.
Unfortunately, that’s only partially true, because you have these options available only on a paid tier. Free users can’t do this.
Simkl seams like a good alternative, it works with kodi, i’m a big fan of Ripple and i will miss that, i’m hooked with ipad app for tracking, i do not see so many potentials in app for Simkl and i do not know anything about its API and if it is available. That is the worst for me. I’m using the API for a project of my own which is used daily by me and helps me a lot. The idea of transitioning the whole code scares me and definetely i do not have the time.
Now serious question, how you are syncing the data from trakt to Simkl ? you said that you connect Simkl with trakt as an application and it gets the data. But this is now, what if trakt as it seams they have thrown Justin to the sharks and has a hostile takeover and trakt stops working in a month and you havent make any transition to any other site ?
Would the backups that we have be enough ? has anyone thought of that??
I’ve canceled and still have until early 2026 when VIP actually runs out. So enough time for me (and many former VIPs) to try out alternatives (be it services or self hosted) and import/migrate data. I did enable periodic backups in trakt to have up-to-date data backed up and can import or migrate that in the future.
It is not like you have just days to move to a new service. Even if a service doesn’t have all trakt features you are using right now, there is still time for the services to implement them. It is now a good time to get involved in the new services, tell them what features might be important to you and then see what happens there.
The only thing that is certain is: VIP is canceled and the future is not trakt.
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