- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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A gentle reminder that Jellyfin exists to those thinking of alternatives.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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”
Jellyfin also „just works“. Getting it going is just as simple as plex.
Have you tried Jellyfin?
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.
Enshittification in action.
enshitification isnt price hike all their “fonctionality” nobody were asking for are
Just to say: MythTv is still a thing…
Ahh, memories. The start of my Linux journey nearly 20 years ago
there are a lot of us still on Plex that hadn’t reached the threshold of issues vs effort that would motivate us to migrate to something like jellyfin.
looks like we’ve arrived.
I have the lifetime pass, bought it for like $80 many moons ago.
looks like we’ve arrived.
Agreed, this is the tipping point. This is where we will see Plex start to abandon the lifetime pass in favor of “imaginary money line go up forever” subscriptions.
Jellyfin
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation Plex Brand of media server package SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #302 for this comm, first seen 20th May 2026, 01:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of the $74.99 I paid for Plex Pass Lifetime several years ago. If they ever get rid of my Plex Pass and try to say “Lifetime didn’t actually mean Lifetime”, I’ll be gone.
We’ve seen other companies pull this move by saying “lifetime” only applies to X version.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean Plex will do it.
While that’s true, it is in the standard VC playbook to make that move. Since they seem to be using that playbook, there will come a point in the monetization program where the lifetime membership becomes a blocker, which is overcome by diluting the lifetime account to increase the appeal of the subscription by comparison.
So, while nobody in here is named Nostradamus, it does not take a clairvoyance to see the future in this case. Countless other companies have followed this same program, with only minor variation, to extract revenue from the product like a strip mine. If I see 100 companies perform a 15-or-so step monetization spiral, it is not a leap of logic to think Plex is going to do steps 9-15 since we’ve just seen them do steps 1-8.
The lifetime membership will never be a blocked thanks to this price update.
I’ve never had a lifetime license be taken away other than the company going out of business.
No, they can’t just breach the contract you have with them, of course, but the VC playbook has a play for that.
What they will do is create a different service tier that does not include the same features as the standard or lifetime plans have. That tier will initially have some “value adds” that are of little interest to most users. Then, slowly, features will disappear from the other tiers, and a greater percentage of users will be drawn to that one because the “standard” one is increasingly lacking.
Eventually, Plex Standard will be quite anemic, with at least a couple must-have features available to only GigaPlex members. Because you’re a “valued lifetime customer”, you’ll get the option to convert your lifetime membership into 90-365 days of free GigaPlex.
So, Plex wins their game. The lifetime members practically all either switch to monthly premium service or leave, both of which are outcomes that are to their benefit. Nobody took away your lifetime membership, they just transformed it to garbage.
Its not every company, but it is every company owned by venture capital.
You can live in fear of your made up scenarios like this, but I’m just going to continue using Plex with my lifetime license.
I’m not afraid of the inevitable, man. We are having a conversation and I’m sharing my thoughts.
Probably going to get hate for this. But I have easily gotten 750 dollars worth of value out of my lifetime subscription. I’m sure they are doing this to drive down lifetime subscriptions and increase month to month. But I legit think 750 over 20 years it’s still a legit price.
About $3/mo. But for a lifetime deal you’re also buying the risk. If they go bankrupt, stop honoring the lifetime deal, or any variation thereof tomorrow, you’re out $750 - lifetime deals, where they exist are often heavily discounted compared to normal rates due to this. 20 years is though quite a long time. Plex is only 16 years old.
In a perfect world a company would limit the amount of lifetime deals available and only have them in the beginning to get some quick cash allowing them to scale. I don’t think Plex is running a very good business, which also devalues the lifetime deal.
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.
