New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing(plex.tv) |
New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing(plex.tv) |
I like plex, I've tried jellyfin and emby and plex has always come out ahead (handling the metadata and the general user experience) and if plex goes bellyup i guess I'll move, but I'll be sad. At least I feel I've gotten my value out of my lifetime plex pass.
They obviously want to shift people to a monthly plan, but still give that lifetime. If I were to buy today vs when I originally, it would still be cost effective.
There are alternatives, so users that don't want to shell up the 150$ now can jump over to. It's closed source software and the users have the opportunity to shift (or build a competing software that meets more of their core needs).
> …
> You have until 12:01 AM UTC on July 1, 2026, to get a Lifetime Plex Pass at the current price of $249.99 USD here. If you’ve been considering it, now’s a great time to buy.
Are you kidding me? This is ludicrous.
> As mentioned in the messaging above, this adjustment ensures that the price of a Lifetime Plex Pass continues to more accurately reflect its true value. Over the years, as our software and product has evolved, the breadth of features and benefits included with your Plex Pass has expanded. This increase ensures we can continue to invest resources into building and maintaining the Plex personal media software, while continuing to offer a Lifetime option.
I don't know how much engineering time is spent maintaining this app, but I haven't wanted (or used) any features added since ~2014 when I found this be a great app for locally streaming my massive Blu-Ray and DVD library. Streaming television, music, whatever else they've added is completely ignored.
Edit: local => locally
With how it's been stagnating recently, even the current prices are a hard sell for me, especially given how "lifetime" with tech companies tends to mean "~five years". I switched to Jellyfin and haven't looked back.
Would we all call it an upgrade?
It ran on a desktop pc that we would just boot when we wanted to watch something. It met our needs. Considered a lifetime pass back in the day just to support the project, although the constant churn of "look at me!" stuff made me quickly realize that their goals were not mine.
A few months ago I finally got around to building a NAS, and discovered that plex won't even run now without a pass. Moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. Getting hardware accel configured took a day or so, but we now use it 10x as much as the old plex server.
services:
jellyfin:
container_name: jellyfin
image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
pull_policy: always
user: "1007:1003" # jellyfin / jellyfin
group_add:
- "44" # video
- "992" # render
network_mode: bridge
ports:
- 8096:8096
- 8920:8920
volumes:
[ ... config, cache, and content ... ]
devices:
- /dev/dri:/dev/driIt had one technical feature that I valued (the ability to tone/color map dolby vision content for non dolby vision devices), but that was such a minimal feature for me (very little of my content is in the proprietary dolby vision colorspace).
But as you say, it's not, and the lack of churn (only patch releases and one blog post this last 6 months) doesn't inspire me to think it's getting better nearly quick enough.
This is not and has never been required. If by remote access you mean actually streaming from the public Internet, their proxies are a low-bitrate fallback in case you can't connect directly - and it can be disabled altogether IIRC.
I'm not reconfiguring my LAN because Plex can't identify remote traffic accurately.
> https://support.plex.tv/articles/200430283-network/
Scroll to "LAN Networks"
"Very few people will need to set or change this preference. It simply lets you specify which IP addresses or networks will be considered to be “local” to you..."
"Tip!: This feature requires an active Plex Pass subscription for the Plex Media Server admin Plex account. Addresses can be specified either as an individual IP address or a range (using IP/netmasks). Do not include spaces or tabs."
Even better, if your subtitle is labelled "English SDH" instead of just "English", when you enable subtitles it helpfully picks the first foreign language subtitle track instead — so you get the bonus feature of having the pause the show and manually changing it before continuing!
It’s not a server or session level setting for some reason.
Global "works", but remembering by series would be so much better.
It was actually worse until about 6 months ago on tvOS, as the next episode started it wouldn’t be showing subtitles, but the selection menu would show the previous episode’s subtitle selection as still selected. You’d need to select none and then what you’d want. Fixed finally.
Overall I’m happy with Plex, been using it for over 15 years and got a lifetime PlexPass some years back which was worth it for skipping intros.
I have been occasionally annoyed when they’ve introduced some kind of “clutter” to my Home Screen, fortunately it’s all been removable and I can still make it show only my content. I just hope they don’t put something in that I can’t turn off.
I used to use Plex for all TV shows, but these days I have 3 online streaming subs so only use it for the few shows I watch that aren’t on one of those.
I don’t feel it’s reasonable that every content distributor wants to silo their content behind a different subscription just so they can avoid “sharing” revenue.
With time passing and the pricing of 3 platforms becoming more and more ridiculous for less and less convenience, I completely migrated to Plex 2 years ago. It's been working flawlessly so far. The UX is not perfect but good enough, it syncs with my phone and iPad, I can download episodes in advance when traveling, I can share access with friends easily... Probably the best $90 I've ever spent for a lifetime pass.
Maybe Jellyfin or Emby would work just as well, I honestly don't know. But Plex is fine.
Plex is dead simple to setup (minus maybe GPU passthrough to a container), Jellyfin and Emby are pretty simple too though.
Plex is avaliable on plenty of devices, including Xbox's and Non-Google TVs, which allows pretty easy accessibility.
Even though I bought my lifetime membership years ago, I think it’s time to explore other options. I don’t like this.
This is a feature I use multiple times per week with friends who live states away. I can’t believe they just dropped it.
And that's why these days, I run Jellyfin on a VPS for watch parties (similar situation as yours), while sticking with Plex for family use.
Gemini recommended Jellyfin specifically for this situation and coded me something that deletes the videos once they've been watched in Jellyfin. Before I was manually deleting videos I'd watched.
I bought Plex Pass a long time ago and it continues to work great for serving up movies but it was really bad with the YouTube videos. I have some home movies that I'm going to try with Jellyfin that I'd given up on using with Plex.
It is currently $250 until July 1, 2026.
It was $100 when I bought it back in 2022.
Triple in price is crazy, especially that high of a price to stream your own content!
At that price, I would be worried that they aren't doing too well financially. I would be worried that I paid that much only for the company to go under or limit its use a couple of years later.
Maybe they’re right, let’s Broadcom this.
- Direct streaming 4K blu-ray atmos rips to home theater: just connected a PC via long HDMI fiber optic cable
- Library organization: tinyMediaManager is awesome for this.
- Watching ad hoc on iPad/iPhone: built a simple Next.js app that lists my movies and and a python script that encodes movies as MP4 and creates HLS playlists. No more real time transcoding.
- Downloading movies to my iPad for long flights: vibe coded an iOS app Claude handled all the AV code to download the same HLS streams.
A few years ago I went full Jellyfin for my media server needs and never looked back. Yes, some people complained Jellyfin client apps weren't as polished. However if you want to pay you can get the likes of Infuse or sign up for a Netpute beta.
There was no arguing with Plex fanboys though and I think even the most ardent fans will slowly start to give up over the next few years. This is a win for Open Source. I can only see the Jellyfin ecosystem advantages starting to compound.
i just use kodi for my content. Data is on my router's hard drive, and before that it was some USB spinning rust attached to the ISP's router, and it just works (Well, TV series needs to be stored with the required folder structure / names to be recognized, but that's it)
That's my usecase, so i never got the PLEX appeal (if i'm outside i just stream from the usual sources)
You just highlighted one of the major Plex appeals :-)
You can also install alternate UIs. There is one that makes the whole thing like an android TV, and another that looks like netflix, also offering you stuff you don't have on your drive. I tried, i removed it. I prefer the stock Kodi interface (not perfect, but doesn't try to sell me anything.)
I use Jellyfin now but still think it’s an overall downgrade compared to the plex experience. Plex just works without any setup in my experience where I have always had hiccups with Jellyfin.
I used Plex for a bit years ago but I bounced off as I thought the interface really sucked.
“Lifetime” license is a never again purchase for me, but I hope Plex users fair better.
You got burned by a crappy company and we desperately need laws about being made whole when a company shuts down it's servers, but demanding everything be a subscription seems like a bad approach in the mean time.
I got mine for $250. Plex worked great. Then they added streaming tie-ins and promotional services I didn’t ask for, making them opt-out instead of opt-in.
They changed how my apps worked.
They made my users sign up for Plex accounts instead of letting me manage them locally.
They then tried making it appear like users had to pay to use my library, even though I had paid for a lifetime pass.
Then they actually did make it require a Plex Pass to stream remote content.
It’s my fucking content, Plex, and this nonsense is why I stood up Jellyfin as an escape hatch.
Good fucking riddance.
Honestly Plex has been wearing me down for years but I'm too lazy to move to an alternative.
Not sure I understand all of the complaining? I got Plex because it let me host all of my music and had apps that worked without much fuss.
This is still true. Are the problems more related to using it for video?
> https://support.plex.tv/articles/200430283-network/
"Tip!: This feature requires an active Plex Pass subscription for the Plex Media Server admin Plex account. Addresses can be specified either as an individual IP address or a range (using IP/netmasks). Do not include spaces or tabs."
One is that they don't really want to sell a lifetime subscription, but it'll look bad if they discontinue the option. This way, they effectively don't sell them anymore, but there aren't people all screaming "They've discontinued lifetime subscriptions. How long until they take away the ones they sold before?!"
Another possible explanation is that it's just a ruse to sell more subscriptions. They probably sold a ton of subscriptions last time a price increase was announced. So, if they need a cash infusion, just announce another price increase. Then, when it turns out nobody buys at $750, decrease the price later on to return to normal.
I’m curious how they determined $750 is fair. Is it just N * Annual_Price and if so why is this value of N fair? But they likely won’t say
I have no idea who will ever buy a lifetime pass at 10x what I paid for Plex in 2019. I struggled with the decision to pay $75 back then. There were effectively zero competitors to their product then.
The big thing is time investment. It is not for people who need it to "just work" - it is very much a tinkerer platform at this point.
Oh and user management is local, which I prefer.
as a bonus, I have a old version Emby Theather (the windows form based one) that plays 4K with no issues on my computer unlike browsers that fail at that.
Ultimately Plex "just works" for the most part, including channel information for live TV. Jellyfin is very impressive, for free.
It is just hard to sustain multiple apps across platforms, when you have little to no income to hire developers.
Anecdotes aren't data and all that.
I need it to work on Roku.
I need it to work on my phone.
Working on XBox is nice.
The last time I tried it, it couldn't handle a folder with hundreds of videos. I don't remember the problem, but I think clicking on one video would play a completely different video.
And their DVR support was really, really bad (I heavily use Plex for OTA DVR - it is awesome).
I definitely would like to use Jellyfin as an alternative, but it's never "just worked" for me.
Jellyfin has no such solution that I can tell. Stuff like give them access over Tailscale is not the same user friendly option that Plex has. When there's an actual alternative for easily sharing with friends, I'll consider it. Til then I've had a lifetime Plex Pass for around a decade.
Ironically, every person I've tried to get to sign up so they can view my content failed, because they all would put in a different email address than the one they were invited to use (presumably one they use for signing up stuff). I then have to either re-invite them or tell them to sign up with the original email address.
All but one just gave up. These are somewhat technical users, so perhaps they're too smart for it?
I'd have to set it up and tell all the consumers of my server to move apps, and not all of them are tech literate. It would take a lot of enshittification to force me to move.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/releases/tag/v10.11.8
The clients are even more active
When I set up Plex years ago, I automatically got the DVR set up with my TV Tuner card. And streaming on my Roku when I'm not at home just worked.
How easy is each with Jellyfin?
group 1: somebody just wants to watch a movie they've downloaded. They either double click the movie file and maybe connect with a hdmi to a tv. Advanced group one users might eve use a usb drive / stick and plug it into a TV for computerless playback. Usually only a single user, or users who don't mind doing it 'manually'
group2: has a 'collection' is concerned with the 'library' of content possibly has a nas or media pc that handles playback. Jelly fin works fine here, and these guys who haven't used plex DO NOT understand why people would use plex given all the objections. (i'm including you in this group, as 'the interface sucked' Possibly a technical user that wants more than just a directory of movie files. I'd say usually a solo user or a shared setup on family tvs within the same network.
group3: These are folk who may be technical, but don't want to waste time pfaffing with linux configs etc . The shit really hits the fan here because this group will also likely want to share their library with family and friends, and perhaps use apps on their TV/devices to access the content, from different places. Plex is AS EASY as netflix to setup in this way. You invite your users from within plex. They create a plex account for free and they download an app on their TV or tablet from the app store, Sign in, and start watching. It (your server) tracks users, progress, between devices and everything just works in a nice way, there is basically zero configuration required.
of course there's overlap and this is broad strokes, but I see these issues pop up on these discussion all the time . The comment above that said 'just use jellyfin' is like saying 'just use linux 15 years ago' is on the money. Jelly fin is cool, but it's needs heavy dose of polish and more TV apps. Half the TV's in my house don't have a jelly fin app but they do have a plex app . I don't even need to check what my freinds and family have, plex app availability is a given.
I guess I view the server-side as mostly fungible, because me and all the people I share with are more technical, have a separate media player (Apple TV etc), and are either light users content with the Jellyfin app, or use a third-party app like Infuse on iOS. I look at the media server software as more like a "media fileshare with metadata and easy user management", but I get why that's not the case for everyone.
I tried plex a while ago and I really disliked the interface and how it worked. I recently tried Jellyfin and found it pretty amazing instead. Setting it up was pretty alright.
As for TVs, My LG TVs have no native Jellyfin app, but it was easily solvable with Android TV boxes that I already had nonetheless.
i do agree the interface can be a bit odd in places, but it takes about 5 minutes to learn, really. Disabling all the plex crap helps a lot so i see only my own content.
As for the tv apps -- yes exactly you already had an android tv box but if you didnt? Then you have to get one, set that up, now you are 2 steps removed from what you are trying to acheive. And what about if you wanted to share your content with grandma or family elsewhere in the country? it's not easy.
Also you just unlocked horror memories of set top boxes etc. I remember years ago i used to run a decent setup with audio, hdmi matrix and various inputs, like a firetv, or a popcorn hour, as well as PC, consoles etc . ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE getting family to be able to use it. they could never get the input right, or the audio right or something. god i forgot how mauch i hate plugging stuff in to the family tv. Thank goodness for smart apps lol! WAF is through the roof. Never thought Id say that.
Now I have a Wiim Pro with ARC HDMI and a Sony android TV. never need to touch anything. all controlled on the tv remote, audio, source and it all just works.