Community Ratings are the crowd-sourced answers you've always been able to get on Does the Dog Die — covering hundreds of trigger categories across thousands of titles. They may include yes/no answers, timecodes, and brief descriptions. They're reliable, broad, and permanently free.

Scene Alerts are designed for watching safely, not just deciding whether to watch. Each alert includes a description of what happens before the trigger so you know it's coming, a skip-to timestamp so you can bypass the moment entirely with your remote, and descriptions written in a consistent style — informative, spoiler-conscious, and never phrased in a way that could be triggering itself.

For most people, Community Ratings are exactly what they need. Scene Alerts are for when you want to stay in control of your viewing experience, moment by moment.

Some do — and we're grateful for it. Community timecodes and descriptions are genuinely useful, and you'll find them throughout the site.

But a Scene Alert is something different. Each one requires a contributor to watch the title, identify every trigger moment, note exactly what happens in the minutes before the scene so viewers know it's coming, determine a precise skip-to timestamp that lands safely on the other side, and write a description that informs without retraumatizing — no graphic detail, no accidental spoilers. That can take 2.5× as long as the title's original runtime, or longer.

That's skilled, careful work. We pay contributors fairly for it, which means it costs real money to produce. Community Ratings are powered by goodwill. Scene Alerts are powered by your subscription.

We ask one question about each category: does knowing exactly when and how a scene unfolds materially affect someone's safety or trauma response — not just their comfort?

For suicide and self-harm, sexual assault, child abuse, and domestic violence, the answer is yes. People in recovery or therapy are often given specific guidance about media exposure. A Scene Alert for these categories isn't a luxury — it's the kind of precise, carefully written information that can genuinely matter.

For most other categories, a Community Rating is generally sufficient. Knowing a dog dies before you press play is what matters. A Scene Alert for that moment is a comfort upgrade — and a reasonable thing to fund through a subscription.

We're not adding to the free list right now. The categories that are free today stay free — permanently, for everyone, with no subscription and no account.

Those categories were chosen because advance warning matters most to someone already in crisis. This was the bar:

Every other category is part of a subscription. That's what pays the contributors who produce all of them, free ones included.

Contributor pay. The people who carefully watch films and document trigger moments — writing advance warnings, setting skip timestamps, and crafting non-triggering descriptions — are compensated for their work. In practice, producing a single title's Scene Alerts can take 2.5× the title's runtime, or longer. This is what makes Scene Alerts possible.

Free Scene Alerts. Every subscription directly subsidizes free access to Scene Alerts for our most critical categories — for anyone who needs them, regardless of whether they can pay. They don't even need to login. The information is no longer hidden away in video form, it's now accessible to anyone in the world who needs it.

The platform. Hosting, development, and the infrastructure that serves millions of content warning lookups every month.

When you subscribe, two things happen. First, your subscription funds the contributors who produce Scene Alerts — the people who spend hours watching films so you don't have to be surprised by them. Without subscribers, there are no Scene Alerts.

Second, it keeps a set of categories free for everyone who visits — no subscription, no account, no paywall. Those are the ones that matter most when someone is in crisis, and they exist because subscribers pay for the work behind them. Subscribing is what keeps them available to people who can't.

Tell people about the site. Share it wherever you already talk to people — a tweet, a Reddit thread, a group chat, a TikTok caption, anywhere. Do you know anyone with a strong social media following who cares about mental health, media representation, or trauma recovery? Passing it along to them could be the most powerful thing you do to help.

You can also contribute directly: rate titles you've seen, and flag anything we've got wrong. Community Ratings stay free for everyone regardless, and the free Scene Alert categories stay free whether or not you ever pay us a cent.