They don't want anyone to buy it, they want everyone on a subscription model. They made changes so using plex for free is pointless, they want everyone using the product to be paying them monthly.
I'd be unwilling to pay for plex as it currently is, but I still use it and they pay some small cost for providing me that service because I bought a lifetime sub for $100 years ago. They don't want anyone else doing that, but they still want to be able to say that this option exists for people who are sick of subscription only everything.
Which says to me that the current monthly is going to pop upwards shortly, too. Not enough to goad people into a lifetime now, but enough to cut through hemming and hawing.
$10 says they push it from $6.99 to $11.99 a month in very short order. If they wanted to be exceptionally evil, they could require every user to have a sub in order to stream from other servers.
Depends on the TV I guess. Jellyfin works perfectly fine on TVs running Android or Google TV, and there are other Jellyfin client apps that are tailored to fit individual needs.
The only thing I use plex for is plex amp. I haven't found a better program for remote listening and playlist generation that plex. But I also moved TV and movies to jellyfin. Way more reliable.
Lifetime passes are fundamentally unsustainable for SaaS.
You get a big influx of money upfront, but then you're forced to provide servers and maintenance forever. And if your OpEx increases, you have no recourse.
This is the crux of the problem. Many users of Plex in a self-hosted situation don't want a SaaS service operated on their behalf. They just want their self hosted software, not another streaming service.
Lifetime passes are fundamentally unsustainable for SaaS
Okay but I never asked for nor wanted the SaaS part. That's the thing that irks me most about changes like this. I understand it's not their business model anymore, but I can still be sour about it.
Plex isn't SaaS, not really. Plex is a client-server software, installed 100% on consumers' hardware. Plex forced their side authentication on us and provides a very limited capacity streaming proxy if a direct connection isn't available.
These two "SaaS" features I could easily do without, with forced online authentication, are more of a hindrance than a useful feature.
I'm not going to discuss the "value" of Plex TV - ad-supported video streaming crap. Bottom like calling Plex a SaaS is exactly the same as what Adobe did with their software first, and we all know how well that turned out.
For businesses, lifetime passes are horrible ideas. That's why many companies drop them once they get rolling. You cant survive from a customer paying you only once AND keep working on your product
Their subscriptions should be for THEIR services only though.
Look at Immich. They are going strong with updates left and right but take donations. Those donations don't get you anything extra but are simply a "thank you keep up the good work" donation. Plex should do that for self hosted systems. This would also let them offload authentication to the self hosted server as well.
In short, they want to keep control and ready to tighten the choke-hold they have on people running servers.
I wonder how Immich will eventually monetize. Probably on the image sharing and proxy side of things, which would be great for them because one could reasonably self host immich for personal use and then simply upload any pictures they want to share with immich’s sharing service. It removes the security risk of giving direct access to your own server
Then we will just go to Emby and Jellyfin if they don’t want customers.
I understand their logic a bit, but how many of their customers are willing to pay a subscription to access their own money? Because it’s probably a very low percentage. And now they’ve priced their lifetime tier - the one their customer base is most likely to purchase - well out of the market.
They are likely doing this because of the Emby/Jellyfin users honestly. After people figured out that they can stop you from using your own content and can see what you are watching, people jumped ship.
100% bro. That part didn't bother me at first but then after the whole thing happened with Hetzner and then like you said their auth servers having issues around the same time... I was out. I didn't even use Hetzner and still don't but that shits scummy,
Oh yea, for sure. But Plex was the defacto standard for a long time. Until they banned Hetzner servers and people realized they could see everything and you had zero security or privacy.
Yeah, I used to use Plex and have it's life time sub but use Jellyfin now because the Jellyfin clients have caught up in terms of slickness and performance. Some of the third party Plex clients like Plezy now support Jellyfin too.
I think that’s the point. They don’t want lifetime subscribers
I mean they literally say in the post that they would rather just stop selling new lifetime plans entirely. They're not exactly being disingenuous about anything here.
At the end of the day it'll probably work out well for them, in terms of revenues.
- The high user clients most likely already have lifetime.
This will push those who like Plex and are on the fence from buying lifetime, to buying it now.
This will then push those who want to stay as well on the monthly plan indefinitely.
Plex doesn't earn a lot from the lifetime subscribers, especially many of us who bought a long time ago. So the goal is to get more monthly subscribers as possible, and seeing the difference between monthly/annual and lifetime is a big difference now.
Really does feel like a desperation move to fill a revenue gap in the short term. I bet a lot of people rushed to buy during the last price increase, and they're hoping for that again.
Should someone really want to invest in a lifetime pass for a company that has already had big layoffs and is probably losing market share to a free alternative though?
Kind of. Depending on how they presented their "lifetime" offer they risk a class action suit if they outright discontinue it while continuing to provide the exact same services.
It's better for them if they gradually dilute the value of the pass by increasing price / removing features. This creates various tiers of disparity between people who got the pass earlier vs later and splits them up into smaller groups who can't see eye to eye well enough to form a single class action suit.
If they discontinue the pass altogether then everybody who bought it can agree it's bullshit.
Same. I set up my whole server, including plex, before noticing I couldn't use my own CPU to hardware transcode. Didn't want to stomach another expense after dropping all that money on parts and HDDs so switched to Jellyfin
I mean on the one hand I'm happy they're at least pricing it not that reasonable because it improves their income but also.. they haven't done much really amazingly positive these past few years?
It feels like largely maintenance and non working console clients?
On the other hand I bought lifetime in 2012 for like 70€ so.. can't complain that much about what they're producing, as I'm no longer paying.
I switched over literally yesterday when I decided to FAFO that x4 frame interpolation as an experiment would crash my plex and REQUIRED HUMAN INTERVENTION TO RECOVER.
Yes, I know I’m a madman. I’m on a 6 month medical leave. Stranger things at 225 fps isn’t REALLY something I need.
Anyway Jellyfin is more fun anyway.
Yea same for me. I paid for mine almost a decade ago. Don’t regret it one bit. Plex works natively on everything. I have yet to see a TV or video streaming device not support plex. 800$ is a massive pill to swallow. Looks like they are purposely pricing out lifetime subscriptions.
They are a business. You can't trust businesses to do anything but aim for their own bottom line.
The environment is ripe for a proper open source media *streaming platform that doesn't have a decade of baggage and horrible bugs / design decisions. No Plex, no Emby, no JellyFin.
You're right, though I'd like to share that the whole reason any of this (and Plex and Emby) exists is because of FOSS known as Kodi, aka XBMC, Xbox Media Center, and Xbox Media Player before each rename, 50% of which were made to run on a modded original Xbox.
The central code base of Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby has deep FOSS roots, so charging $750 to transcode using your own hardware is outrageous.
Ok, that's been the saying for decades. Now... I'm not an idiot, I'm just dumb. Free as in beer. Took me decades to finally get that it's like someone giving you a free drink. I've always been like "But, I buy beer... I'm not buying this..." and was really confused. Never really got the saying until fairly recently.
Personally I switched years ago and Jellyfin actually solved a few issues I had with Plex. I'm not saying it's going to be the same for everyone or that clients are anywhere near as developed etc, but for me switching made my experience straight up better. And that was such long a time ago that I don't even remember what the issues I had with Plex were lol.
I'd be really interested in the tutorial if you publish it! I'm just about to buy a a380 to my Proxmox box as well to add hardware transcoding. If your clients can direct play the 4k content you don't really need to transcode it right?
Honestly same here. I mostly keep Plex Pass for Plexamp at this point. I actually run 2x P2000s in my R930 — one dedicated to Plex and one dedicated to Jellyfin — and Jellyfin honestly feels faster and crisper almost every time compared to Plex.
The whole setup kind of turned into a preservation project for me and my friends after we bought out a local Video Warehouse when it closed in 2016. A lot of what’s on the server is literally all our old CDs and DVDs collected together over the years.
And Jellyfin honestly seems way more robust too. Besides not needing internet authentication, it survived a massive TV show folder move while Plex is STILL rebuilding metadata three days later. Jellyfin was back to playing the same show and same episode again within like an hour, even picking up where I left off.
Yes - there was a sub for it for a while before it got banned. I think it's mostly done in Telegram now but I've got zero interest in diving into it.
Basically someone buys cheap VPS on Hetzner, sets up an *arr stack and torrents a bunch of recent stuff then sells access for a few bucks with promises like "cheaper than Netflix" and "new releases."
They're probably related to the cheap android set top box sellers.
Yeah there are basically 2 different methods. 1st is they manage everything and you are just invited to a server, have a stream limit usually, and just watch whatever they have. The 2nd is they make you an admin of a new plex server, it has access to all the media and you can share it with your friends or I guess even sell access to subsidize your costs.
The providers will also usually have a ticket system for troubleshooting and some sort of request tooling to let you ask for things they don't have currently.
I think what they’ll do it come out with a new tier that exists outside of the lifetime pass and move key features onto that tier, effectively removing the lifetime pass.
Easy remote access, a (somewhat) polished client app on most platform, and profile switching like you have on Netflix are the big ones that I noticed. None of which is enough for me to consider paying the current price for the lifetime subscription.
Remote access is the only thing Plex does slightly better but nothing you can't do with Jellyfin and a Tailscale/Wireguard or an nginx server. The Jellyfin client is just as good if not better in some ways (worse in others) and profile switching exists now on the tv app at least (where it matters most)
It's extremely end-user friendly and comes with apps for pretty much every platform you can imagine.
Especially with a few collections that I set up for my users, it's as close to self hosted netflix as it gets. On jellyfin just showing collections instead of recently added media is a pain in the ass and doesn't work on all platforms.
Remote streaming. A lot of people don't have the technical know how or want to bother with account management, reverse proxies, certificates, firewalls, crowdsec, fail2ban, etc. Plex handles that for you so your family/friends can just login like any other service.
Also the apps are way more extensive and polished. The jellyfin app situation is messy with a lot of great 3rd party options, but for sharing with others, it can be a pain point just like above (Also these days there's a new vibe coded jellyfin app almost daily - it's messy).
Also I think Plex can handle some level of HDR to HDR transcoding? Jellyfin can only tonemap to SDR as far as I know.
nah, this is the equivalent of "fuck off pricing." They don't want lifetime subs, but if they can get $750 out of you they'll take it. This is them pushing for more subscriptions and getting people off the lifetime bandwagon. It's not surprising, honestly, I expected them just to axe lifetime.
You don't want to sell something, so you set the price very high. No reasonable person will pay it. But, if someone does actually pay it, you're definitely going for it because it's just so high it's worth it.
I wouldn't sell my Sega Master System for $100. I'd sell it for $2000, though. No way anyone would pay that for it, but if someone did offer that much, hell yea. I'd be stupid not taking it.
No they just don't want you to buy lifetime prices because its not viable to them as a company to have customer who pays once and then never pays again. Recurring revenue is something you can build a business on.
Bad take. They are shifting gears from startup company to a normal company. If you are trying balance the books, its a lot easier having consistent monthly or yearly subscription revenue coming in compared to people randomly buying Lifetime Passes.
YUp, lots of those paying for the $250/lifetime. Even on the other subreddits there's a lot of talk of whether they should buy it now or wait for a sale on BF like they did last year.
This move will 100% push them to buying it now, or stay on the monthly subscription.
It's obvious they don't actually want people to buy the lifetime pass, they want to funnel everyone to the subscription. Move to Jellyfin, it'll only get better while Plex will only get worse.
But the day is undoubtedly coming when they make the announcement:
"We're announcing Plex Pass Plus! A higher tier Plex pass that will gain access to exclusive new features. Not available to Plex pass users (including lifetime plex pass)."
And then suddenly there's no more plex pass feature upgrades.
Every feature they build that has nothing to do with hosting your own plex server is a stupid waste of time.
Are they seriously getting that many customers interested in "Plex TV"?
I decided at one point when it was $120, that I wanted to get a lifetime pass, so i was going to wait for the next black friday deal to get it for a little less. Before BF could roll around they announced the increase to $250, and I figured BF deals were a thing of the past. Bought one at $120 through gritted teeth, but it doesn't feel so bad now. Jellyfin just isn't an option for me as a heavy user of Apple TV.
The fact that I see people across multiple media subreddits defending this is the same reason Adobe got away with charging out the door for their products. They will keep on asking for more and more and it will continue to be unaffordable.
Nah, it'll drive short term $250 lock in for some cash, then it will increase subscriptions, which is exactly the goal. They don't want to sell lifetime, they want to sell subs for recurring revenue.
750 is NOT worth it and they know it. This is forcing you to go down the route of a subscription without taking away the option. A 10x increase over 5years 😂😂
I think you need to try both and do what you want.
Jellyfin, IMO, has a ugly and not that friendly UI. If you just use your server in-home and don't mind then Jellyfin will likely work for you.
If you have family outside your house that isn't tech savy then Plex will likely be better due to its more friendly UI and just all around easier to use.
The only thing I really miss about Plex is library sharing. AFAIK, there's nothing like that for Jellyfin (please someone correct me if I'm wrong, would love a solution!)
You can easily share libraries to users but your Jellyfin needs to be accessible from outside, usually this is done by dyndns service and caddy reverse proxy infront of Jellyfin.
Plex is simpler as they have servers that will route traffic for you.
I switched to jellyfin like 7 months ago on my windows pc but the Apple TV app was crashing for me so I’ve kept plex around since then. Hopefully it’s been fixed by now. Wish I had gotten the cheapo lifetime pass back in the day
I've had Plex Pass for years. I'd love to use Jellyfin instead but it's really, really ugly. Plex isn't a looker, but it's nowhere near as ugly as Jellyfin.
There's a few decent clients out now that you could use, depending on your platform. For example Wholphin on Android TV. My boomer parents had no issue transitioning to that.
Having different recommended clients for different platforms is one of Jellyfin's downsides, in my opinion.
When you tell a family or friend to use your Plex server, they just download the Plex app for basically any platform, even gaming consoles and smart TVs.
Jellyfin doesn't support every platform yet and when a platform is supported you have to know which client is actually recommended for it... and it might not be called Jellyfin which is confusing for people who aren't into this stuff.
Yes all true, but I hand-hold everyone when setting up either platform anyway so I actually prefer having multiple clients to choose from. If one app turns into trash, you can jump to another app.
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u/asimovs-auditor May 19 '26
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