Plex has announced a massive price increase on the service’s Lifetime Plex Pass. On July 1, the lifetime subscription option will go from $249.99 to $749.99, an increase of 200%. The price hike will only apply to new subscribers, with no changes to monthly or annual subscription pricing.
I “defend” plex against silly complaints, but jesus christ that is one giant leap for no gain. That’s stupid, no one will pay that - though I tend to think that’s the whole point.
the thing I hate the most about news like this is all the jellies screaming out “I iNsTaLlEd JeLlYfIn BeCaUsE i KnEw ThIs WoUlD hApPeN!”
we get it. you sniff your own farts.
Jellyfin has lots and lots of tutorials, fyi. it’s not as intimidating as it seems once you get going with it.
And Plex doesn’t require any. It’s okay to accept that one product can be more polished than the other, and Plex has a lot of stuff that “just works”
And Plex doesn’t require any. It’s okay to accept that one product can be more polished than the other, and Plex has a lot of stuff that “just works”
And it is ok to accept that Plex is getting worse and worse. Only reason why ppl use it these days is because they still have an old lifetime pass. As soon as they take it away or introduce a new tier of features or even removing features of it, they will swarming away from Plex.
And they will!
OC never said anything to do with your comment, you seem to be really offended by recommending an alternative to a tool that you use.
Jellyfin also „just works“. Getting it going is just as simple as plex.
Have you tried Jellyfin?
I have it running in parallel with Plex to keep an eye on its progress. There is a lot of things that do not just work. Hardware Encoding for example, or safe remote access
This is the most hilarious lie I think I’ve seen in a while from open source on here. To be clear I use it as my daily driver, I switched off Plex a long time ago when I saw the writing on the wall.
But I still have issues with media matching to this day, issues where subtitles on certain devices just refuse to display no matter what you do. And the server still loves to randomly take up absolutely massive amounts of memory for seemingly no reason whatsoever I ended up making a strip to just forcibly kill it and restart it every 12 hours to prevent it from eating the entire system’s memory.
And no my file naming is not the media issue everything I do is properly named exactly as jelly fin documentation says it wants by sonarr. Not to mention you are expected to maintain a VPN system just for accessing your media away from home as the web interface is so hilariously unsecured as to be a constant source of major system vulnerability.
It’s usable, but it’s not as just works as Plex I have thousands of TV shows, anime, and movies as in thousands of each of those categories and Plex never once failed to match to the correct media, never had a problem just playing subtitles on any client, and I think only ever had one major issue with the web interface in terms of security? There’s been lots of minor ones that would give people essentially just access to Plex but not the underlying system
Plex doesn’t “just work” I have lost access to my install more time than I can coun’t due to their weird prove you are the owner system.
I’ll admit I haven’t really looked into it, but how is the Jellyfin web interface insecure? I don’t currently, but in the past I’ve used ssh reverse port forwarding to my VPS and then used an Apache proxy and letsencrypt for ssl on a subdomain. Maybe I was just lucky, but I never had any problems.
It has had a pretty high number of RCE exploits including one recently the architecture of the web service is just very poor and leads to a lot of basic problems.
Personally I am not a fan of the language they chose, and I think it directly leads to a lot of these problems but that’s just like my opinion man.
The server itself also has tons of issues like the constant memory leaks that cause it to eat up endless amounts of memory that they don’t seem interested in fixing and basically once again push it to the users to deal with and a bunch of the boot lickers are like yeah you just need to put it in a Docker and limit its maximum memory as if that’s just normal and expected to need to do
Ah, yeah, guess I never realized it’s a .NET program. Never understood why an open source dev would choose .NET, but what can you do.
Also despise Docker (especially the modern over-reliance on it), but that always gets me into trouble when I admit that publicly.
I am right there with you on the docker hate I get the idea but the docker system itself is a huge problem. The amount of people that do not realize it completely bypasses system firewalls is very sad and unfortunate and leaves a lot of people vulnerable.
I personally try to use lxc containers that I set up myself for containerizing services and install them natively within the container
It has had a pretty high number of RCE exploits including one recently the architecture of the web service is just very poor and leads to a lot of basic problems.
So they had an RCE that got fixed therefore the software is bad and insecure. Therefore every OS and basically any enterprise software that was ever used is insecure.
Got it.
That would be the case, however the devs official stance is it’s unsafe and should not be used other than over vpn. So they also agree
People who dont know a lot of tech stuff cant set it up to access while outside the house so i wouldnt say it “just works”
My comment wasn’t for you then, it’s for people curious in an alternative but may be hesitant
I install Jellyfin using docker, go to the web address, make the credentials for it and I am up and running.
For Plex you need to do that whole gain ownership song and dance which is a pain if you don’t have full console and file access like on TrueNas.
Isn’t that 300%
With the original price as $250, a 100% increase would be adding the entire value to itself once (i.e doubling) taking us to $500.
A 200% increase is adding the $250 to the original two times for a total of $750.
So calling it a “200% increase” is correct.
It is true to say that “$750 is 300% of $250” or that “The price has tripled” - both correct, but the increase is only 200% because increase doesn’t include the original as part of the value.
This makes perfect sense, thank you
TBH—and I’m not a native English speaker—I think it’s a bit ambiguously phrased. “Increase by 200%” would be more clear.
Fine. Forget about it.
I got this on Black Friday many years ago for ~70 and despite the pass I am slowly moving over to Jellyfin. I really don’t see how they came up with this valuation, seems like a last money squeeze before abandoning ship.
They don’t want lifetime licenses to sell, they want monthly subscriptions from everyone.
Everything changed when they signed that A24 deal, and its not even the good movies, its the shitty also-rans. They want revenue now.
I wish them luck, but it seems despite all the data collection they failed to understand who their customers are. Idgaf about their content, I block and remove it where I can. Instead now we have content that will not convince anyone to cancel their Netflix or HBO to move to them and I have a home server that barely runs anymore because the software is so bloated.
The Jellyfin vs Plex thing always struck me as odd. As in - why are we holding JF to a different standard to (say) Immich, Syncthing, Pi-hole or any one of a thousand different programs people self host?
Yes, JF ships multi-user accounts and client apps etc. I get it, “multi-use” is implied, so the comparison isn’t totally unfair. But there’s a difference between ‘this feature exists’ and ‘this is the primary purpose of the tool’.
The fact that you CAN share it externally doesn’t mean everyone running JF is doing that, or that it should be the benchmark the whole project is judged by.
To me, self host means “I host it, myself” not “I host it and then pretend to be Netflix for family and friends”. If that’s the use case, then of course, Plex away.
It’s cool that you CAN share JF externally, and it’s cool that Plex does that differently / better. We shouldn’t hold one to the standards of the other.
Never used Plex. Jellyfin has always met my needs, so I never bothered to try it.
Plex has been around quite a while longer than JF. Before JF, the only way to really have a “self-hosted Netflix” was with Plex, so there are a lot of us who built our long-standing media setups around that.
That said, I have a JF instance running and matched almost 1:1 with Plex specifically for this situation, so I’m going to start pivoting everyone to that as I wind Plex down.
Meh, I’ve used dlna with PS2 over 20 years ago. Not exactly the same, but for my needs essentially the same.
That’s an interesting method. I actually have a PS2 myself, running PSBBN. Maybe I’ll try that out.
There’s a great project called WatchState that allows you to sync show progress between JF and Plex. Highly recommend it for while you’re switching over.
A gentle reminder that Jellyfin exists to those thinking of alternatives.
A gentle reminder that Jellyin more or less requires you to set up a reverse proxy and a secure VPN to use it outside of your home.
Why would you not do that anyway?
Because if I’m watching locally I dont need them, and if I’m watching remotely Plex already offers secure remote viewing 'out of the box`. They give every user an SSL certificate and a public accessible URL at app.plex.tv. They also handle secure user authentication. The new price is stupid, but Jellyfin is not a 1:1 replacement.
As someone who picked up lifetime for like $45 or whatever it was (I think a 50% off sale?) what must have been 15 years ago…
I run jellyfin. Its just a better experience IMO.
I’m sorry but you can hate Plex and prefer jellyfin all you want, but you don’t have to lie. Nothing about jellyfin is a “better experience” than Plex.
What are some examples?
Don’t have to make an account, for starters. Gives you more detailed control of transcoding options, audio playback and whatnot.
The UI looks much worse, that much is true, but that’s not the end all be all of user experience.
Making an account is what allows the easy library sharing and remote streaming, something that Plex is significantly better than JellyFin at.
What transcoding options does it have that Plex doesn’t?
How is Plex significantly better than Jellyfin at those things? I can just create a user in 2 seconds on the admin dashboard for Jellyfin, set a temporary password and my friend can log in and change it to whatever they want.
I can even limit the streaming bitrate to the account if I need to avoid bandwidth issues.
Unless your user comes and logs in on your network, and only streams when they’re at your house, then you’ve just opened your server to the world.
Plex has bandwidth controls.
Tailscale and IP whitelisting are both viable options
They mentioned remote streaming which jellyfin doesn’t have a secure way to do by itself
No, but that’s easy to setup with Tailscale or a myriad of other solutions for free.
Does Plex? Have they ever been security audited or are we just taking the word of closed source software because they make it easier? Like Microsoft who just got caught adding backdoors into billions of computers and (pick one) closed source software company who has had major security breaches in the last decade.
It doesn’t cost $750.
…to stream your own media, hosted on your own server 😅
Neither does Plex.
No you are right, it is 800 euro.
No, plex has many price points, including a free one.
Jellyfin is easy to prove you are the owner off. While Plex has issues with that on systems like TrueNas when you don’t have full access to the server
Why are you having to prove you’re the owner of it exactly? What you’re describing is “user error”.
The whole claim token thing and no it was a know issue
Was? So it’s not now?
Again, if you installed Plex in a setup that it is known to have issues with, that’s a user error.
No lol, that’s just a pourly designed system.
Also Plex worked with IX systems to get Plex on Truenas
For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex
If you ignore the mostly horrendous UI, the security problems, the worse transcoding performance, the harder setup, the difficulty to access it remotely in a safe way,… Yeah sure, way better
The ui can be improved with community addons like moonfin but i agree it would be nice if they improved these out of the box
I couldn’t care less about the client design, since you have free choice there. If only the devs could be arsed to fix the issues that prevent me from just putting it behind a reverse proxy. If I could let people use it without exposing what is essentially an open door or forcing them to install a vpn, I would probably do that and slowly ween off Plex
This is a good illustration of the tradeoff of free software.
Jellyfin is core software, its mission is serving media, not providing auth or secure access. Those can be handled by other projects.
When you say “the devs can’t be arsed”, I think you’re misunderstanding that they won’t ever work on this, because that isnt the model.
The tradeoff with “free” (both in terms of free speech and free beer) is that work you need to do yourself to connect those pieces.
Lol, what an insane take. EVERY project that exposes an API is responsible for securing that. Its not rocket science, its server software 101.
Being free is not an excuse, especially when there are perfectly valid migration strategies, that don’t force them to abandon legacy clients.
Fans like you are the reason they get away with disregarding their basic responsibility
“Fans like you”?
Fuck off.
How are other projects going to handle using the Jellyfin app to log into Jellyfin? I don’t understand this. I see sentiments like this pretending Jellyfin is perfect like they don’t understand why people use Plex. I want to give my mom a URL that she can login to (or even better she gives me a code) after she downloads an app. What is the point of Jellyfin itself not handling this? It’s pointless. If I’m going to have a half baked server app, I might as well just use Kodi. They can be as stubborn as they want with this but people need these very basic things. I’d actually donate money to the project if they didn’t stubbornly REFUSE to do the main thing every Plex user wants. Other projects don’t need to do this. The Jellyfin developers need to. I first tried Jellyfin 6 years ago and this is STILL an issue and so I just stay on Plex because I’ve already got lifetime. I WANT to move to Jellyfin but I need to give normies access to my stuff and apparently that’s a wontfix for them?? I can host all this shit myself. I just need it all built in and for the apps to support it. I don’t think anyone is crazy to want this right?
What the hell.
This is self hosted and you’re screaming about not having an easy button.
As I mentioned, jellyfin is not an auth platform, nor a reverse proxy. And they will never be. Build your own, there are many products out there. Or hire someone, Christ.
Either way, quit bitching, put on your adult pants and either add auth to jellyfin, use Plex, or shut the fuck up.
You just give those people the name of the app your recommend (Jellyfin, Moonfin etc) and give them the URL and their username, then they create a password.
It’s not that difficult for most and if it is you help them once with it.
Plex doesn't have hardware transcoding unless you pay almost 800 euro
I, and I assume everyone on this forum who has one, paid around 50-100€ for their lifetime pass. My hardware encoding works great and doesn’t need me to tell it about each and ever codec in existence and how to handle each one.
The new price is insane, but that was not the topic of this thread.
Isn’t plex’s price hike the main topic of this post?
You are right,. that is fair. You can also pay 230 euro currently for it.
It’s not better in any way other than cost. That cost comes with massive drawbacks.
If you use it weekly it shouldn’t be free to you, certainly if you use it more frequently than that. Give money to the projects you depend on or they will disappear.
Supporting software that you use by paying for it?
Ew.
/kidding
I’m a very happy lifetime membership owner and have zero problem with them removing features from the free version. Free doesn’t pay the bills unless you want to become the product.
You find a place on jellyfin.org where they take donations? I was looking last night and only found a link where you could contribute your time.
If you click through some of the options on this page: https://jellyfin.org/contribute/
It links to a donation option here: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
I never thought those leopards would eat MY face.
The company’s blog post also described a number of improvements they plan to make
After you pay: “oops, we won’t”
As a lifetime owner, the number of features they’ve deprecated is probably the worst part.
- Photo support (luckily Immich came along)
- Tidal integration (no idea if that was Plex or Tidal’s decision)
- Plugins (god forbid anyone add the functionality they keep removing)
It’s close between that and the last app overhaul that removed a bunch of functionality.
Watch Together isn’t removed, but it’s been deprecated and has stopped working on at least one platform (Chromecast).
Really shitty move to be removing/deprecating functionality and then asking for more money.
Fucks sake, when did that happen?
https://support.plex.tv/articles/watch-together/
February of 2025, looks like.
they must be tired of running that company.
Is the whole world right now like me at the very end of a SimCity 3000 game, when it’s time to just turn on all the catastrophies?
Could they at least send the fun ones like Godzilla and aliens?
I do not think late stage capitalism was one of the endings, so I second the fun disasters.
Its so much less cool than that.
Business leaders have finally gotten the legal oversight landscape set up so the cash register is being monitored by a blind baby that was dropped on its head, so they’re all just lining up robbing the place.
The end-game plan seems to be to keep it up until things go all Mad Max, then hide in underground vaults until that blows over and start it again.
I know that whales exist, but seriously… Who is into self hosting but also into dropping $750 on a service that can end on a whim?
They dont want you to buy lifetime they want you to pay month to month.
I think it is safer to say they don’t prefer it. If they didn’t want you to buy it at all, they could discontinue the offering today.
Its like when a contractor quotes you a ridiculous price because they dont want to do the work. They assume you are going to say no, they dont want to do it. But if you say yes to their absurb price they are happy to take your money.
Jellyfin
I used jellyfin but prefer plex and since I use it locally its free and better than jellyfin. If plex ever charges for local use hello jellyfin!
Wrong comment
Do you never leave the house for any period of time where you might want to bring some of your media?
In short; do you never travel?
Plex charges for downloading your own media through your own local network onto your own local devices.
I’m not talking about remote streaming. I’m not talking about downloading media while you’re already out of the house. Nothing about local downloads to local devices should require Plex’s servers, so it should come at no cost to them, which makes it a pure cash grab.
So yes, Plex does charge for local use :)
There are only like 4 movies I want to watch when I’m away from home and they are stored on my laptop. I had plex setup for outside use but didnt use it that much and figured when I did I was only interested in 4 movies. Step brothers - The greatest beer run - the big Lebowski - master and commander! I get em straight from the source Im home at the time why would i use the download feature??
I think it’s important to recognize what Plex is saying with this announcement: their current business model isn’t sustainable. That means those who already have lifetime passes are vulnerable to Plex going away. If/when that happens, what will those users do then? That’s the conversation worth having now.
