Triple in price is crazy, especially that high of a price to stream your own content!
At that price, I would be worried that they aren't doing too well financially. I would be worried that I paid that much only for the company to go under or limit its use a couple of years later.
How can they justify an exponential price increase like this? The blog post doesn’t really mention new features aside from bringing features from the desktop website to the mobile app…
Even though I bought my lifetime membership years ago, I think it’s time to explore other options. I don’t like this.
Every few years I try Jellyfin, and each time it really fails bad.
I need it to work on Roku.
I need it to work on my phone.
Working on XBox is nice.
The last time I tried it, it couldn't handle a folder with hundreds of videos. I don't remember the problem, but I think clicking on one video would play a completely different video.
And their DVR support was really, really bad (I heavily use Plex for OTA DVR - it is awesome).
I definitely would like to use Jellyfin as an alternative, but it's never "just worked" for me.
I bought a "lifetime" Plex pass for about $75 way back when, and within 6 months they'd banned my account for using a VPS for my media server. No way to appeal, no recourse. You'd have to be mad to give these scammers $750.
Yeah, no, that price does not justify the service.
I got mine for $250. Plex worked great. Then they added streaming tie-ins and promotional services I didn’t ask for, making them opt-out instead of opt-in.
They changed how my apps worked.
They made my users sign up for Plex accounts instead of letting me manage them locally.
They then tried making it appear like users had to pay to use my library, even though I had paid for a lifetime pass.
Then they actually did make it require a Plex Pass to stream remote content.
It’s my fucking content, Plex, and this nonsense is why I stood up Jellyfin as an escape hatch.
My favorite feature of Plex is that it resets the subtitle track to `None` when the next episode in a series starts. I love manually switching on the same named subtitle track every 30 minutes! $749 is actually too cheap for such an amazing feature.
It was actually worse until about 6 months ago on tvOS, as the next episode started it wouldn’t be showing subtitles, but the selection menu would show the previous episode’s subtitle selection as still selected. You’d need to select none and then what you’d want. Fixed finally.
Overall I’m happy with Plex, been using it for over 15 years and got a lifetime PlexPass some years back which was worth it for skipping intros.
I have been occasionally annoyed when they’ve introduced some kind of “clutter” to my Home Screen, fortunately it’s all been removable and I can still make it show only my content. I just hope they don’t put something in that I can’t turn off.
I used to use Plex for all TV shows, but these days I have 3 online streaming subs so only use it for the few shows I watch that aren’t on one of those.
I don’t feel it’s reasonable that every content distributor wants to silo their content behind a different subscription just so they can avoid “sharing” revenue.
Even better, if your subtitle is labelled "English SDH" instead of just "English", when you enable subtitles it helpfully picks the first foreign language subtitle track instead — so you get the bonus feature of having the pause the show and manually changing it before continuing!
Steep price, but honestly makes a lot of sense. Lifetime licenses are never sustainable when you own a lot of infrastructure. Plex owns the auth, the reverse proxy infrastructure (to make it dead simple to setup), and a ton of development overhead and backend licensing deals.
They obviously want to shift people to a monthly plan, but still give that lifetime. If I were to buy today vs when I originally, it would still be cost effective.
There are alternatives, so users that don't want to shell up the 150$ now can jump over to. It's closed source software and the users have the opportunity to shift (or build a competing software that meets more of their core needs).
So soon after an abysmally bad and unpopular redesign? Why would I make a long term commitment to a platform that removes features and worsens over time?
Plex has slowly been going down the drain. I could be convinced to buy a lifetime pass for $90 (even if it's just for paying to watch my own content), but $750 is strictly "get outta here" territory.
With how it's been stagnating recently, even the current prices are a hard sell for me, especially given how "lifetime" with tech companies tends to mean "~five years". I switched to Jellyfin and haven't looked back.
I’m still salty that their last app platform rewrite dropped Watch Together as a supported feature. Server still supports it, browser clients still support it, as well as the older Plex apps if you were prescient enough to turn off automatic app updates and manually keep refusing to update the Plex app.
This is a feature I use multiple times per week with friends who live states away. I can’t believe they just dropped it.
It's been death by many cuts for me with Plex. This follows the recent change where if a device on your network is not in the same IP range (say you have some clients on 192.168.1.x and some on 192.168.2.x, but on same subnet), Plex considers this to be remote access and demands payment now. I believe this is a response to users who run Plex on their own VPN rather than pay Plex the sub fee for their remote access solution.
I'm not reconfiguring my LAN because Plex can't identify remote traffic accurately.
i just use kodi for my content. Data is on my router's hard drive, and before that it was some USB spinning rust attached to the ISP's router, and it just works (Well, TV series needs to be stored with the required folder structure / names to be recognized, but that's it)
That's my usecase, so i never got the PLEX appeal (if i'm outside i just stream from the usual sources)
I run Jellyfin because I want my media on my network and I don't want some intermediary getting any data about me or my friends or controlling what I can do.
Smart move. Lifetime passes are not very sustainable for a business. Especially when they own and run a lot of the flow. This prices out most purchases and gets folks funneled into regular payments.
I use Jellyfin now but still think it’s an overall downgrade compared to the plex experience. Plex just works without any setup in my experience where I have always had hiccups with Jellyfin.
Happy to continue paying annual for Plex as I think it's worth it, but I'm definitely also installing Jellyfin alongside and starting to look at what really limits swapping completely. Currently that's mostly things like missing PlayStation apps, need for plugins to handle certain features, more complex accounts/auth story, etc.
I'm hopeful that with AI development (on a short leash), the Jellyfin core contributors can increase velocity somewhat and really close the gap.
I ran a plex server for about a dozen years just to watch local movies and photos on a couple of rokus. No matter how they pushed, I never created an account because I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them.
It ran on a desktop pc that we would just boot when we wanted to watch something. It met our needs. Considered a lifetime pass back in the day just to support the project, although the constant churn of "look at me!" stuff made me quickly realize that their goals were not mine.
A few months ago I finally got around to building a NAS, and discovered that plex won't even run now without a pass. Moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. Getting hardware accel configured took a day or so, but we now use it 10x as much as the old plex server.
50 comments
[ 484 ms ] story [ 2306 ms ] threadIt is currently $250 until July 1, 2026.
It was $100 when I bought it back in 2022.
Triple in price is crazy, especially that high of a price to stream your own content!
At that price, I would be worried that they aren't doing too well financially. I would be worried that I paid that much only for the company to go under or limit its use a couple of years later.
Even though I bought my lifetime membership years ago, I think it’s time to explore other options. I don’t like this.
Would we all call it an upgrade?
I need it to work on Roku.
I need it to work on my phone.
Working on XBox is nice.
The last time I tried it, it couldn't handle a folder with hundreds of videos. I don't remember the problem, but I think clicking on one video would play a completely different video.
And their DVR support was really, really bad (I heavily use Plex for OTA DVR - it is awesome).
I definitely would like to use Jellyfin as an alternative, but it's never "just worked" for me.
I got mine for $250. Plex worked great. Then they added streaming tie-ins and promotional services I didn’t ask for, making them opt-out instead of opt-in.
They changed how my apps worked.
They made my users sign up for Plex accounts instead of letting me manage them locally.
They then tried making it appear like users had to pay to use my library, even though I had paid for a lifetime pass.
Then they actually did make it require a Plex Pass to stream remote content.
It’s my fucking content, Plex, and this nonsense is why I stood up Jellyfin as an escape hatch.
Good fucking riddance.
It was actually worse until about 6 months ago on tvOS, as the next episode started it wouldn’t be showing subtitles, but the selection menu would show the previous episode’s subtitle selection as still selected. You’d need to select none and then what you’d want. Fixed finally.
Overall I’m happy with Plex, been using it for over 15 years and got a lifetime PlexPass some years back which was worth it for skipping intros.
I have been occasionally annoyed when they’ve introduced some kind of “clutter” to my Home Screen, fortunately it’s all been removable and I can still make it show only my content. I just hope they don’t put something in that I can’t turn off.
I used to use Plex for all TV shows, but these days I have 3 online streaming subs so only use it for the few shows I watch that aren’t on one of those.
I don’t feel it’s reasonable that every content distributor wants to silo their content behind a different subscription just so they can avoid “sharing” revenue.
Even better, if your subtitle is labelled "English SDH" instead of just "English", when you enable subtitles it helpfully picks the first foreign language subtitle track instead — so you get the bonus feature of having the pause the show and manually changing it before continuing!
They obviously want to shift people to a monthly plan, but still give that lifetime. If I were to buy today vs when I originally, it would still be cost effective.
There are alternatives, so users that don't want to shell up the 150$ now can jump over to. It's closed source software and the users have the opportunity to shift (or build a competing software that meets more of their core needs).
With how it's been stagnating recently, even the current prices are a hard sell for me, especially given how "lifetime" with tech companies tends to mean "~five years". I switched to Jellyfin and haven't looked back.
This is a feature I use multiple times per week with friends who live states away. I can’t believe they just dropped it.
I'm not reconfiguring my LAN because Plex can't identify remote traffic accurately.
i just use kodi for my content. Data is on my router's hard drive, and before that it was some USB spinning rust attached to the ISP's router, and it just works (Well, TV series needs to be stored with the required folder structure / names to be recognized, but that's it)
That's my usecase, so i never got the PLEX appeal (if i'm outside i just stream from the usual sources)
You just highlighted one of the major Plex appeals :-)
I use Jellyfin now but still think it’s an overall downgrade compared to the plex experience. Plex just works without any setup in my experience where I have always had hiccups with Jellyfin.
It ran on a desktop pc that we would just boot when we wanted to watch something. It met our needs. Considered a lifetime pass back in the day just to support the project, although the constant churn of "look at me!" stuff made me quickly realize that their goals were not mine.
A few months ago I finally got around to building a NAS, and discovered that plex won't even run now without a pass. Moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. Getting hardware accel configured took a day or so, but we now use it 10x as much as the old plex server.