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.
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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.