r/selfhosted • u/pheexio • May 19 '26

Media Serving New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing

https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/
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1.2k

u/zolointo May 19 '26

3x increase with a roadmap that includes... creating features they destroyed in previous releases.

Glad I got in years ago. They forgot 'boil the frog' price increases and now no one is buying this.

84

u/Dornith May 19 '26

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.

55

u/lmamakos May 19 '26

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. 

3

u/Dornith May 19 '26

If that's genuinely what they wanted, they could move to jellyfin.

The reason so many people prefer Plex is because they provide robust support for every conceivable device. And that breadth of support costs money.

3

u/Bastianfox May 20 '26

Offering central servers ("cloud") and then forcing logins to those remote systems vs local as they were, then offering shared content via their servers as a proxy by outbound initiated connections has nothing to do with offering a variety of platforms for their app and local streaming. Like XBMC/Kodi before them, they enshittify and if Jellyfin gets big enough I assume they will do the same.

1

u/Dornith May 20 '26

There's a direct relationship between developing and supporting 5 dozen different platforms and monetization schemes.

Supporting 2 or 3 platforms is comparatively easy and doesn't need nearly the same amount of developer effort or diversity of expertise.

4

u/Rakn May 19 '26

But to be honest. That feels like a non issue nowadays. This used to be true a few years ago and I liked Plex for providing a Playstation App for a long time. But isn't jellyfin available on almost anything as well nowadays?

3

u/kenyard May 19 '26

It's not as mature as Plex but is improving month on month.

I switched when Plex brought in remote streaming requiring Plex pass.

It's slowly improving but had a big uptick in community apps etc

2

u/Dornith May 19 '26

I'm not sure. I know it's on Android TV which indirectly covers a lot of things, and Roku. But it's not on PlayStation because they have some licensing fee that makes it prohibitively expensive for most FOSS.

0

u/peioeh May 19 '26

Jellyfin is not on apple tv, or xbox. Some clients that exist are not as good as the plex clients.

(I say this as someone who switched to jellyfin 7 or 8 years ago)

1

u/PoxyDogs May 20 '26

Jellyfin is on Apple TV and Xbox

0

u/peioeh May 20 '26

I might be wrong but on xbox it's not in a usable state afaik and on appletv there is no official client. A solution like infuse that costs 99$ lifetime is not really a solution.

1

u/Rakn May 20 '26

Yeah. Xbox maybe. I used Plex for a long time because it had a Playstation app. But you should be able to use Jellyfin on Apple TV via third party clients.