Collectorz.com Movie Collector

2024 Update: The developers announced earlier this year that the desktop applications will not see any new feature development. There will only be maintenance updates "for as long as it is feasible". They strongly encourage users to move to their cloud-based, web-only applications.

Personally, this is a(nother) dealbreaker for me. For an application where I spend a lot of time entering data, it is completely unacceptable to me to not have this data stored locally and under my control. I'd assume that a lot of people who would use a software like this, being slightly obsessed collectors, will feel the same way.

The reasons are obvious. If your data is stored remotely, its integrity and availability is at the operators' whim. The same goes for the availability, stability, and state of the software itself. It can become, temporarily or indefinitely, unavailable for any of a thousand reasons, many of them beyond your or even their control. And it will usually happen at a time when you really wanted or needed to use it. It can also permanently disapper at any moment, again for thousands of possible reasons. Given that uncertainty, it's simply not something I'd invest many hours of my time into anymore, because I could wake up tomorrow and it has all been for nothing.

Luckily, the desktop applications still work for now, and they have powerful export features so you can move your data somewhere else, somewhere safe. In my case, since I never really found a good replacement for the Collector desktop applications, that will probably be a custom solution in Access or Excel.

I don't need to remind you of the countless and ever more frequent cases of cloud services and web applications losing, modifying, restricting, or destroying user data, discontinuing services, making breaking changes, jacking up prices... it's inevitable. If a web app has good export functionality, it could mitigate these risks and issues to some degree, although that again is a lot of manual work. Personally, my web app fatigue is just too extreme at this point, and I won't bother trying to find out. From here on out, I insist on 100% local and offline, or I'm out.

What also came off a bit bizarre to me is how this move to the cloud seems to be some kind of a trigger issue with the developers. I've been a Collectorz user for probably 10 years or more now, was active in their forums and also had a couple of contacts with customer support. They're an opinionated bunch, for sure, but their responses still seemed reasonable and friendly. But whenever someone implies that local, offline, desktop software has its advantages, too, and that web applications might not the be-all, end-all utopioan golden perfect solution to everything, the reactions become weirdly condescending and dismissive, insinuating that you're just not getting it or using the software wrong. A forum thread where users asked whether others preferred the web or desktop applications, and the overwhelming majority voted for desktop, was simply locked. It gives a bad vibe and doesn't particularly make me feel good about continued use of the tools.

I have been a long-time user and customer of Collectorz software (Game, Music and Movie), I probably purchased my first license around 10 years ago. I was always very happy with the functionality, support and value for money.

However, Collectorz recently (and quite silently) switched their licensing model for the desktop and mobile apps from an "update subscription" model to a pure subscription model. And with this, sadly, they have lost me as a customer and user, and made me start looking into alternatives.

The difference might seem small, but I don't think it is. Before, you would receive updates for as long as you paid your subscription fee, but could still keep using your then-current version if your subscription ran out. In other words, your license to just use the software wasn't expired retroactively. Now, you will apparently get completely shut out of the software unless you keep the subscription payments up.

While I do understand their argument that they also provide online services which cost them money (the cloud storage for your collection, and data from their media databases), it doesn't really matter to me since I was only interested in the offline functionality of the software. In theory, it should have been simple to just tie access to cloud storage and databases to an ongoing subscription, without deactivating local licenses. But maybe my personal preference to store my own data locally, and keep control over it, is so outdated and passé by this point that it wouldn't have made sense to implement it that way for me and the two other people who feel that way.

It's not even that it makes a difference to me financially, because I've pretty much had a permanent update subscription to all three tools I use for many years now. But it's a matter of principle, and it just doesn't feel right anymore.

What's maybe even worse is that this new subscription model still ties licenses to machines, not to users. Meaning that if, for example, you have a desktop and a laptop computer, you're not allowed to install the software on both, even if you're the only user and you never use them at the same time. Ironically, this also makes a prominently advertised feature of their online services – the ability to sync databases between machines through their cloud storage – pretty pointless.

Even with all the sympathy I have built for Collectorz over the years, this is unfortunately the end of my Clz story. With a tear in my eye, my remaining months of subscription (and yes, I'm aware that my old licenses are "grandfathered") won't be spent actually using the software anymore, since I'd rather spend that time looking ahead and finding new solutions.