Trakt is a privately owned company, we don’t share financials publicly. You don’t have to like that answer, but I don’t think we are unique with having private financials as a privately owner company,
Ha, no. We of course have a database as the foundation for everything, but again you are severely underestimating the infrastructure required to run Trakt.
As with any business, salaries are of course a large expense.
I do appreciate @Ohifriend jumping in to help answer things. I am also trying to answer and clarify misconceptions. Of course I care as does the entire Trakt team. It’s ok to not like my answers, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care.
You’re welcome to believe that, but it isn’t true.
partial costs were made public a long time ago when images were stopped being served through trakt itself in the API (and that traffic redirected to TMDB thereby) Trakt API Images will be removed on October 31, 2016 | by Trakt | Trakt API Blog | Medium
that is from over 10 years ago however so I’m sure the dynamics have changed, and the site did improve a lot in stability. I’m sure it’s not pennies (plenty of mobile apps hook into it to). but as Justin said, I don’t think he is gonna give you what you’re looking for. Looks like they’re willing to take that risk.
My assumption for the hike was the expanded team, never really looked into the younify thing (I don’t use the scrobbler) but it does sound like they indeed get their cut. if I’m not mistaken so does justwatch. it’s just TVDB who was never considered to be worthwhile to be payed for…
TIL that what I pay for Amazon Prime and Disney+ is substantially, like absurdly, more than some others pay. Amazon Prime is $14.99/month or $139 per year. Disney+ anywhere from $9.99/month for a basic to $159.99 per year for an ad free subscription. Pity there’s no Amazon Forum I can go tell Bezos how to run his business and question their pricing and services…
Anyways, time for me to unfollow this topic because it’s going around and around in circles and everything has already been answered by Justin at this point while his answers are still being questioned.
Prime is AU$79 a year for me in Australia (including all the free shipping) whereas Trakt is approx AU$100 per year (if paid annually, otherwise it’s AU$120 if paid monthly). There’s something very wrong with Trakt’s pricing structure when a database service costs significantly more than a value-loaded content subscription for Prime.
Regional pricing would help the user base with the recent limitations.
It would not solve the issue of Trakt being worse than it was for non-VIP (and also VIP) users, but it might lighten the situation a bit.
As an example, in Hungary, Trakt costs the same as one of these (when looking at the yearly price for each at the discounted rate) services:
Netflix (720p, no ads) ~ half of the US price
Prime ~ third of the US price
Max (Standard) ~ half of the US price
Disney+ (Standard) ~ half of the US price
We could argue about the value of these streaming services and Trakt, but in my opinion, a tracking service should not cost as much as an actual streaming service.
My dear, you are completely confused in your answers while changing your shoes in the air:smirking_face:: first, you close access to the service from my country (Russia) and cancel your free subscription, then they complain that the costs have increased and there is nothing to pay with. Where is the logic ???
PS Oh, by the way, how about paying the authors of the Kodi plugin that they developed for free to access your service ??
I don’t subscribe to the auto-payment feature. So I went to buy another year and learned the price of VIP is 200% of previous year because I’m not now a member. Also observing my lists have each been limited. I guess message received.
That may be however even at $5 right now that’s £3.84 GBP a month which is less than a large coffee…so my point still stands. I don’t mind paying for someone or a teams hard effort is what I’m saying. especially if it’s a product I use, time is money after all. Old VIPs have also been paying for longer so if anything newer members are just playing catch up…
Maybe another option where you get less features might solve that then? I’m not taking sides. Just merely giving my opinion.
You don’t have it so bad. I live in Canada and recently paid my $60. and got charged $90.02 Canadian. I have removed auto renewal and will see what the exchange rate is at that time. I didn’t mind the $60, but I do object to the $90.
I apologize immediately for my bad English. I have been using Trakt for 13 years. I would like to say a huge thank you to the team for the excellent service. Of course it was unpleasant to learn about the new restrictions. I work in the sphere related to websites, so I understand very well how expensive it can be to maintain servers and support such a product.
But for my region the price of VIP is really quite expensive. And I don’t even have the opportunity to pay directly, and I don’t think there will be regional prices for me in the near future.
I also understand that the subscription should cost a certain amount, so that the number of VIP users to cover the costs.
But maybe it makes sense to think about a super lite version of the subscription for around 1$ where there will be nothing - Reviews, Stats, Autotracking, Filtering, Backups, Export even Lists and Collections. Just unlimited Watchlist.
It is clear that there are those features in VIP for the sake of which most people buy a subscription, and it is most likely Lists, Collections, maybe Filters and adding such a tariff will probably break the economy, but without Watchlist the service becomes almost unusable.
I am willing to pay $30 per year, the problem is that I made the first subscription through Google Play via the app and when I canceled the subscription because I wanted to pay annually and not monthly, the subscription went back to $60 instead of $30, $60 is too much, a shame
I currently only have 1 day of VIP left.
