Well, I know I probably won’t leave as I am locked in the 30$ price… If that changes I’m probably finding another service. Other users might do similar and I don’t want the Trakt team to interpret that as being ok with the price increase or free tier changes. Also I would like to add that I mostly paid because I wanted to support the service, not that I needed the features, I do use some now as I am paying but could live without them.
And thanks for trying to communicate with the users.
That’s perfectly reasonable!
Exactly, they are locking the existing users from leaving more than anything. This model only supports the existing users and is infact a ploy to keep them forever than add new revenue. Everyone is thinking if I leave, I lose a good deal meanwhile new users are thinking, I can’t join cause this is a bad deal. Pretty shady stuff in order to lock the existing VIP from leaving.
I started trying VIP just before the price went up from $30 to $60 and I do indeed feel held hostage.
Not a nice feeling and that negatively impacts how I look at Trakt/VIP.
Your mixing Younify’s app ‘Younify TV’ (their B2C offering) with ‘Younify Connect’ (their B2B product)
Them offering something free to their users doesn’t mean they provide their services for free to other companies (like Trakt).
So you are telling me, Younify, the site that advertises “everything you’re watching now and everything you want to watch, all in one place.” and “All of Your Watchlists Together At Last” is totally free to use but Trakt, that is partnered with Younify, wants us to pay $60 for us to have a watchlist greater than 100?
Something tells me Younify plans to takeover but Trakt doesn’t even realise it yet. Remember when Google paid billions to Firefox, Safari, etc to have Search present but ended up taking their Browser Market Share with Chrome?
It’s worse cause Trakt is paying for their own demise, making their own competitor rich while Younify is probably building a Better, Cheaper Trakt with free streaming scrobbler.
In your opinion, sure. Many other VIP members see value in the other features.
No. While I appreciate all the speculation in your post most of the assumptions are simply wrong. I posted a previous reply here with more info related to what you wrote.
Not sure I understand this logic. We aren’t holding anyone hostage with their VIP membership. It’s up to the member to decide if the price is worth the value they are receiving, whether that is a long time VIP supporter or a new signup.
We have never released revenue numbers, so no idea where you are getting these numbers from. You are also severely underestimating the infrastructure costs required to run Trakt at the scale we have.
The company that owns TMDB is subsidizing those costs.
Yes, @warregubbi is correct. These are 2 different offerings with the free Younify app being more of a proof of concept of what their SDK offers.
Again, this speculation is interesting to read but not based on any actual data.
The very concept of having a VIP subscription based on an earlier rate is the definition of holding those people hostage. Not only is that very shady practice but you are holding them hostage by pretending to give them benefit for finding the service earlier while punishing those who found the service later. This is extortion, threat and downright bad faith.
While you denied that 99% of VIP users are not at grandfathered rate, you can’t prove it. And since the price increase came less than 6months, I find it hard to believe most people didn’t lock in before the increase and are forced to stick with it. Even if its not 99%, I still believe its in the high 90’s.
Actually it is based on actual data, Younify already provides watchlists from all streaming sites, they lack tracking but they are also currently partnered with Queue, who just recently announced the full capability of pulling watch history and watchlist from all streaming sites and their annual plan is half your cost while they have a lifetime plan as well. Queue previously offered their services for free so the new plans are all thanks to integrating Younify.
Now imagine if they merged, their prices will go down and yours will stay at $60, grabbing all your users while you are out here promoting Younify and increasing prices for them.
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.
This is the definition of speculation. 
Well, I did say, imagine, so duh. But that doesn’t make any of the things I said before that “speculation”. Queue is still priced at roughly 45% less than your pricing structure. They have streaming scrobbler and tracking. Their offering was free until their tie up with Younify. Their main source of income is thanks to Younify. It is not difficult to speculate that if Queue turns out to be successful or even innovative, Younify could buy it out and implement it into YounifyTV. Heck, they don’t even need to merge and you still have two competitors that you yourself are advertising and driving your customers towards.
Don’t be Motorola, Nokia, Microsoft, etc( (Read - Refusal to listen to their customers and trend and adamantly ruining their business.). Your reluctance to remove grandfather rate and lowering current price will butcher your growth while the hostage will try to escape too. Don’t ruin it by keeping a loyalty program that is only gonna drive down your future and growth. Its not really a loyalty benefit, its a dooming mechanism thats killing your service slowly by both sides. Price increase is common but 100% increase only cause you don’t wanna charge your old users with higher price, even if it comes from goodwill it becomes bad faith for making them feel trapped while forcing new users to bear the brunt of the price increase. This is bad business practice. That’s all.
Better to look for revenue from existing VIP users by bumping their price by a small margin and removing the grandfather rate. And if it is still not feasible either cut ties with Younify or buy it out if their prices are too high to maintain at $30-$40 VIP.
As I said in a previous thread, my India regional price is $18, which is in fact more than the Yearly subscription of Disney+, Prime Video, etc in India but still better than the grandfather rate. Your business model needs change, saying it for the sake of your business not cause I want VIP at a lower price. Let go of the grandfather rate and provide reasonable and consistent pricing. It will keep everyone happy. Add a donation/tip button.
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.
That’s how it works buddy. $140 is nothing for US people but alot for others. Bezos is a billionaire for a reason, he knows pricing it reasonably in different regions will only make him richer. So while you may think prime at $15 a year is not a lot for him, considering the population India brings, it is indeed a lot for him. And it is what people can afford. But I bet, most people still go with $7.5 ad-supported plan. Also, you can indeed go and complain to Amazon and get a discount. Difference is, Trakt will still cost you half of what it costs you for Prime. Meanwhile, for me, Trakt is still gonna cost me 20% extra than prime.
While you talk about this, might I remind you the disparity between the currency. Unless your house rent for a month is $140, I don’t think think thats alot for you. Now imagine, someone living in India who pays $140 for living space and $140 for prime and you will figure out why Bezos is a billionaire and you are not.
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.
I think, Prime regional prices should give Trakt a very good idea of how to go with regional pricing. For example, if they are going with $60 in US where Prime is $140, that makes it roughly 43% cost of Prime and offer Trakt VIP even after rounding it up at 50% would still be better. They can look at regional pricing like in Italy and make it €25 for Trakt VIP and similarly AU$39 for Australia.
It would be a good start since they already have a big company like Amazon as a template. More likely than not, as you said, 5 or even 10 people will get it at that rate than 1 or 2 at beyond expensive rate, doesn’t even make sense let alone affordable if Trakt costs more than streaming sites.
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:
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.
The adverts that pop up cover those costs and more.
There’s no ads though!
I don’t know where you’re seeing ads but can’t be anything native Trakt. Maybe a third party app?