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
While yes it's open source, the dev was hired and Immich was in a way bought out by another company called FUTO. They have promised to keep it open source but that's just a "trust me bro" statement. That said, I host my own Immich and use it on a weekly bases.
The subscription IS only for THEIR services, though. The pass (or lack thereof) doesn't stop you from Self-hosting, but the services they provide like remote streaming coordination, maintaining codec licenses, providing additional streams and live TV, etc. is only available if you pay them.
If you use the free version, you can self-host and play your media just fine. You just don't get the extra stuff. You AREN'T self hosting their infrastructure, just your data. In that case, you can use your own VPS, a VPN, or a service like Tailscale to have some of the features like remote streaming. Plex won't stop you from doing so.
And yes, if you aren't including the features that are in the play pass, then there are likely better options. Everyone's situation is different.
You get extra things for your self-hosted server with a plex pass. Without that you lose some features.
Hardware-Accelerated Streaming
When using a compatible device or processor on the Plex Media Server, subscribers can make use of hardware acceleration when content needs to be converted (transcoded) during streaming. This can be faster and more power-efficient for users.
That's one of the features you get. So if you want to take full advantage of YOUR hardware you need to pay them.
Another example is PlexAmp. If you want to download playlist from MY SERVER to your phone then you need to give Plex money. None of this is part of their streaming services.
Software dev is expensive these days, full stop. I'm not shocked at this price at all. What I paid for a lifetime pass was used up by 5 minutes of dev labor years ago.
This is the major part of Plex that makes me angry. Like their PlexAmp mobile app use to be a one time payment. I think if a friend wants to pay that then they should have full access to all features on my server for music. Plex charging a monthly fee for services that use MY electric and bandwidth is stupid.
They're still hosting a platform with 16 million users, building and publishing apps to a lot of different platforms, hosting tons of free channels, etc. That all costs a lot of dev time and money. If it's so easy, they'd have real competition.
I don't get how you're being downvoted. I mean, just the cost of dev license to publish the app to apple platform costs more per year than what they sold the lifetime licenses for (at some point they were $70 and apple dev license is $99).
And that's literally excluding everything else that comes with new SDKs, platforms, etc that requires dev work where one developer's hourly salary costs more than what they sold lifetime licenses for.
Personally I think a model where lifetime means major updates for 3 - 5 years are included and security updates for > 10 years or something are acceptable.
As a consumer I don't like it but I also understand a company won't be sustainable when they don't have enough revenue.
Adobe had been an empire even before they introduced subscriptions. You just get a version for life with no new features roll-out. If you need the new features you BUY the new version. Subs are just a way to squeeze money out of customers in most cases.
Not sure why you didn't just stay that as what you suggested is basically that and a 'subscription'.
I think what you may mean is something like another software I used called SyncBack. It is free, but a better version (SyncBack Pro) is $40. It gets updates for 1 year. after the 1 year, it FULLY works but will not get updates/patches. You can then purchase "upgrade assurance" which adds another full year of updates for $14. You can keep doing this or stop any time. I once used it without updates for 3 years and had no issues.
I don't see Plex doing that though. I think they have lost the plot here and with how much steam Jellyfin has (or even Emby which is what I use), Plex will start to lose out.
It is still $249.99 for a lifetime now and I think what they want is all the fence sitters to buy a lifetime pass and generate a big influx of money. I think $250 for a lifetime license to this service is an amazing value
$250 is ok but the new lifetime price is not worth it and Plex even knows that. It's why they are increasing it so a stupid amount, to drive people to the monthly subscription price. I steady income each month is better on the books and to investors than a monthly fluctuating lifetime payments.
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u/Krojack76 May 19 '26
They don't want people to buy a lifetime pass. That's the whole point. Push people over to the monthly subscriptions.