I’m sending what would have been my VIP Trakt sub for the next year to the developer behind Yamtrack, and it feels like a much better use of my money.
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Well thats interesting. I wonder why they pushed the date back (unless its to give the 30 days notice as their TOS stated).
Mine renews on June 6th, maybe I let it renew at $30 then cancel…
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I went ahead and signed up for the free account at Simkl and synced my trakt account, now my Jellyfin and Netflix are updating both so… problem solved (for now)?
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This whole thing has to be a joke right, right?! It’s absolutely baffling how tone-deaf the owners are towards the - loyal - users. Not even one response in this thread and the only response is from some nobody, no one even knows.
I’ve always had sympathetic thoughts towards Trakt, but this whole ordeal just leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. I guess it’s easy to don’t care if your pockets are filled with money…
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I don’t know about the EU, but I’m sure Trading Standards in the UK would like to hear about it.
Yeah, thats why you should appreciate trakt regarding this. Trakt just needs to fix their pricing issues.
Fair point on Trakt’s privacy defaults. They do deserve credit for making them strong right out of the box, especially for free users.
On the Simkl side, I agree there’s room for improvement, particularly with how searchable profiles are by email, even without logging in. That said, their paid tiers do offer detailed privacy settings. I’ve locked mine down completely, and when someone searches for my username or email, all they see is a message that says the account is private. No watch history, reviews, or lists are visible.
But to be clear, full privacy control is only available to paying users on Simkl. That’s definitely worth calling out. It’s not ideal that basic protections aren’t offered to everyone by default.
As for pricing, Trakt really mishandled things. The issue isn’t just the higher rate. It’s how the change was communicated and the decision to end grandfathered pricing. That feels like a breach of trust. Even if they reverse course on the pricing now, a lot of users are already questioning whether they can rely on the platform going forward.
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Interesting detail: Raluca, who posted the original pricing announcement titled “Upcoming VIP Renewal Pricing Changes – Effective May 20, 2025”, was last seen on the forum at 10:33 AM on May 13, just one minute after posting it at 10:32 AM. She has not posted or been seen on the forum since.
It appears she logged in solely to publish the announcement and then left immediately, without engaging with any of the user feedback that followed. Whether she stepped away on her own or was directed to stop participating is unclear. Given her role as Product Manager and the scale of the community response, her complete absence is noticeable. It would be helpful to know if she is still involved in this rollout or part of the Trakt team.
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From a business standpoint, honoring grandfather rates is counterproductive for both users and the company. Which is why, back in January, while advocating for price decrease, I predicted the way things are going, they will most likely remove the grandfather rate as not a lot of new users would be signing up at that rate.
By honoring grandfather rate, they were basically transferring the major cost of keeping the project alive onto the new users. Which won’t really work as new users will feel the value is not worth it and eventually they would have to increase prices for others as well. But what they did wrong was, they should have levelled the prices now that the old users are taking equal part in cost. Something like 35-40usd should have been logical but they overdid it.
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I told Justin about this way back, that he was gonna antagonise his users if he keeps it up and most likely some other service will benefit from this. But if they fix up and accept their mistake while providing a compromising solution for both side, at-least some will join back. As they say, everyone makes mistakes but not owning up and rectifying them is the main problem.
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That horse has bolted
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They disabled that today…
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Just adding my name to the list of people who have cancelled VIP owing to the price hike.
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That’s great news. Thanks for the heads up!
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The power that be in Trakt must be sitting back self satisfied that there have only been a couple of hundred cancellations thus far. What they may be forgetting is that there are many subscriptions that will come due in the next 11 months. Many will wait until the date for renewal gets closer in order to be able to find a suitablr replacement and get their data moved.
At that point they will cancel. I am sure that the former members will be very vocal in their disappointment with Trakt. I know that I have been recommending Trakt for over a decade. I cannot recommend it any more. I am sure that others feel the same.
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Thank you for the Simkl recommendation.
Was able to set it up with both Plex and Kodi scrobbling, which is all I used trakt for.
At this point, even if Trakt were to reverse course, just on principle my money would still be going towards another service. Trakt really gave a master class in “How not to do PR 101”.
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Well, quite!
My renewal was due June 16th, so I wouldn’t have had another year at the $30 price point even with this temporary few weeks’ extension. I wouldn’t be able to afford to double it even for a service I used regularly - I’d have a hard time even if it were a daily thing, I just don’t have that much disposable income. So after 5 years of VIP status, I’m out - properly now. I’ve already imported my account content over to SIMKL to try it out.
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Seems like they’re trying to just ride out this wave. Justin responded a couple times like everything’s normal.
They did create a new features category to conveniently show everyone there are no new features with this price hike.
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Yeah, these new features will be available RSN - Real Soon Now, they promise.
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Probably be beta features no one cares about and never asked for
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