- 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.
You must log in or register to comment.
Seems funny that they continue to increase the price as that value sharply declines with the limited life left in it.
Just out of interest as someone who has recently set up a Jellyfin server - what’s the main “value add” of using Plex compared to Jellyfin?
It seems to do everything I want, so I’m not sure why people would pay for Plex over the FOSS version.
Ease of use, and actual secure and usable external access.
Friends/family make an account and tell you their account name or email address, you invite them to your library and that’s it, they can watch/listen to your media on pretty much any device they have. No vpn needed.
Jellyfin is not meant to be exposed to the internet for remote viewing. It also doesn’t have a client on most devices people use to watch tv/movies.
Are you accessing your media from outside of your network?
I have heard that you need to set up a VPN for Jellyfin to securely use your media library remotely. Plex handles all of that for me so that I don’t need to deal with it.
I do not, and don’t plan to. Probably wouldn’t be that hard to set up though as someone familiar with nginx.
I guess Plex uses their own VPN under the hood then to make it more convenient?
Yep, and it generally has fewer sharp corners. Like last time I checked, in order to set up quick sync, you have to manually check each codec you want to offload to hardware. And if you select one that isn’t supported by your hardware, you find out when you try to play that. So it means carefully cross-referencing with the Wikipedia page for your quick sync version. Plex just has an enable hardware transcoding check box and it figures it out for you.
There’s also some features like smart playlists that I remember needing to set up plugins for whereas Plex supports it out of the box.
Of course ther are other things where jellyfin comes out ahead, like surround to stereo down mixing - I could never get the center channel (dialog) to be at a good volume when down mixed to stereo on my TV, but it just works and produces the correct volume in jellyfin.
But ultimately I think what causes all my users to prefer Plex is that the official app is polished and consistent across all platforms. The official jellyfin one looks like a programmer put it together with bootstrap components, and my favorite alternatives (like findroid) are in active development (I do donate on a reoccurring basis though in hopes that it reaches a level of polish matching Plex)
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.
For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex
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.
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.
Except when I bought my lifetime it meant lifetime for the SERVICE, not the app…
Did it. I don’t remember it saying that. And I bought it around the same time as you since I paid the same price.
I like to think I got my money out of mine as well, even though I only used it for like a year or two before switching to jellyfin.
So basically, they just want to phase our the lifetime plan, but they know removing it outright would cause outrage so they “just” increase the price to massively lower interest and then say: “Well nobody wanted it so we removed the product”.
I swear to god plex and the profiteering sons of bitches behind it can go fuck themselves.
The make more off of FAAS then lifetime sub’s. More of their users are FAAS users them stream your own.
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.
The company’s blog post also described a number of improvements they plan to make
After you pay: “oops, we won’t”
are they insane?
From a purely profit-oriented perspective, no. They’re setting up a pretext to eliminate the lifetime license plan due to a lack of interest. No sane person would pay that kind of lump sum for the service (and the insane ones will bring in triple the revenue), so they’ll claim that there is no market for it. After that, they’re free to crank up the periodic subscription prices.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.
Does this already have a name? If not, can we call it “Riccitiello’s Law”?
Not really. Their plan for a while now is to convert all to subscriptions and this is just their latest salvo. Next up is getting rid of it completely due to “no demand” and then kicking existing lifetime accounts to some static version that won’t be supported.
Yes.
I never thought those leopards would eat MY face.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web Plex Brand of media server package VPN Virtual Private Network nginx Popular HTTP server
[Thread #302 for this comm, first seen 20th May 2026, 01:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
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!
