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Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fe

Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative! [1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/ https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

judge2020 3mo ago
Makes me feel lucky that I got it for $120 in 2021. But I appreciate that they still offer a lifetime pass at all.
- ssl-3 3mo ago
  $120 isn't too bad. I paid $75 in July of 2019. $750 is nuts.
  - hack1312 3mo ago
    I paid $75 December 2013 and then a similar amount as you in 2021 when I set up a system for my parents. $750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.
    - theshrike79 3mo ago
      The lifetime model isn't sustainable, that's why they're pricing it out.
      - ssl-3 3mo ago
        It had been sustained for something like 14 years, though?
        theshrike79 3mo ago
        Yep, but there’s a limit to everything. At some point you hit market saturation and the forever users are just costing you money and new user acquisition isn’t enough to offset it. Nobody likes the subscription model but it’s the easiest way to sustain constant development bigger than side hustle projects.
        hgoel 3mo ago
        It isn't sustainable in the context of their desire to pivot to being a streaming service, along with their desire to blow resources on repeatedly redesigning the apps to make the UI slower and buggier.
  - adamors 3mo ago
    It was $120 even a year ago (bought one in April of last year), the jump $750 is really weird.
  - freetime2 3mo ago
    The change to $750 just took effect July 1st. I suspect we're going to see some big discounts down to $400 or less around Black Friday and periodically at other times of the year. pCloud, a cloud storage provider who offers lifetime plans, uses a similar strategy. Basically I think they are putting the $750 price out there a) for anyone who is dumb enough to pay it, and b) as a way to make limited-time discounts and the annual plan seem like better deals by comparison.
walrus01 3mo ago
I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN. I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore the folders. There's a folder for movies, a folder for TV shows, and then stuff is organized within there by its directory name and filename. I double click on something I want to watch and it opens in VLC. Dead simple and works.
- locksleydev 3mo ago
  Clients on everything, watch history tracking, meta data collection, nicer player, quick transcode for mobiles and other portable media players you don't want 4k on, automatic subtitle collection, live TV DVR, and an interface so simple my grandmother can use it.
- bombcar 3mo ago
  Jellyfin is nice for various reasons (main for me is play synching) but Apple TV + Infuse + SMB share made something pretty bulletproof and kid friendly even before.
- igorstellar 3mo ago
  You’ve described NAS in general. It’s more than just file system. Plex gives you Media Library indexing, web app, mobile and TV apps to play content from your NAS, from anywhere in the world (it even includes Relay, in case you don’t have public IP or accessing NAT traversal).
  - judge2020 3mo ago
    Even with public IP, it brokers an HTTPS certificate for you, which many smart TV platforms and OSes require for operation nowadays.
- sasaf5 3mo ago
  I have almost the same setup. Plus a 3rd party app called "Material Files" to access it on my phone.
hack1312 3mo ago
$750?!! Holy shit.
- benoau 3mo ago
  It's $980 if you buy it through Apple... and the crazy thing is Plex is actually losing $75 if you buy it that way!
  - frutiger 3mo ago
    Losing $75 while gaining $675.
    - IAmBroom 3mo ago
      If your paycheck was shorted $75, you might care.
artisin 3mo ago
[dead]
spl757 3mo ago
I remember when Plex wasn't a money grab. Many moons ago.
zerof1l 3mo ago
Have to admit, quite impressive that someone is still paying this much for Plex given the free alternative like Jellyfin that can do pretty much everything the same. What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?
- VPenkov 3mo ago
  It's pretty slick looking which is worth something to me. Not $750, but something. But even though some of the UX choices of Jellyfin didn't make sense to me, it's an amazing piece of software, so I'm sticking with that, and using Wholphin [1] as a frontend. [1] https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin
- dewey 3mo ago
  I have a lifetime pass I bought many years ago for not much money, Plex had apps in all Platforms. Jellyfin does not at this point, even though there’s work being done everywhere. Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.
- jerf 3mo ago
  What information do you have that people are actually paying this price? There are plenty of situations where a business must charge over X for one reason and must charge under Y for another, where Y < X. What happens is generally they go for the "over X" branch for fairly obvious reasons, then go out of business sooner or later because they can't actually charge that. Just the fact that they are trying to charge that much doesn't mean people are paying it.
- nvarsj 3mo ago
  Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk. Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.
m4xp 3mo ago
How is that even a viable business model? I don't know a single self host person that would pay a subscription for something they are hosting
- freetime2 3mo ago
  According to this Forbes article [1], Plex earns the majority of their revenue from selling ads in their streaming platform: > Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business. So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market. Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerable-video-app-plex-emerges-as-fast-favorite/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerab... [2] https://www.plex.tv/plans/ https://www.plex.tv/plans/
  - fg137 3mo ago
    I have seen people talking about this "hosting a small streaming service for friends" thing, and I really have trouble understanding that. It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it, even with a VPN, and I don't know what kind of friends they have. That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.
    - jonathanlydall 3mo ago
jorvi 3mo ago
My biggest beef with Plex is that they've pivoted away from being a media server first and are trying to change into a streaming platform first, and because managers inside the company have to show KPI, they're stuffing the streaming buttons and sections and recommendations in everywhere. Really frustrating because the media server experience is still by far the best. It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the streaming crap is disabled.
- baggachipz 3mo ago
  > It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the [enshittified] crap is disabled. This can apply to almost any modern application.
  - hypercube33 2mo ago
    Try the Plezy app or the web server URL directly. For now it's far better. I believe you can disable the streaming garbage to some degree.
- soggybread 3mo ago
  Honestly, this is why I stopped using plex. I set up and ran my own server because I wanted to see the stuff I have, mostly digitized family VHS and then suddenly I'm finding movies and shows on my server that I didn't put there.
  - unixhero 3mo ago
    To be fair you had to disable those feeds and then the content would not appear. User hostile move nonetheless.
- _superposition_ 3mo ago
  The only good thing about this in my setup is I can add shows/movies to my watchlist from their advertisements and it gets picked up by my arr stack.
  - 3mo ago

judge2020 3mo ago

Makes me feel lucky that I got it for $120 in 2021. But I appreciate that they still offer a lifetime pass at all.

ssl-3 3mo ago
$120 isn't too bad. I paid $75 in July of 2019. $750 is nuts.
- hack1312 3mo ago
  I paid $75 December 2013 and then a similar amount as you in 2021 when I set up a system for my parents. $750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.
  - theshrike79 3mo ago
    The lifetime model isn't sustainable, that's why they're pricing it out.
    - ssl-3 3mo ago
      It had been sustained for something like 14 years, though?
      - theshrike79 3mo ago
        Yep, but there’s a limit to everything. At some point you hit market saturation and the forever users are just costing you money and new user acquisition isn’t enough to offset it. Nobody likes the subscription model but it’s the easiest way to sustain constant development bigger than side hustle projects.
      - hgoel 3mo ago
        It isn't sustainable in the context of their desire to pivot to being a streaming service, along with their desire to blow resources on repeatedly redesigning the apps to make the UI slower and buggier.
- adamors 3mo ago
  It was $120 even a year ago (bought one in April of last year), the jump $750 is really weird.
- freetime2 3mo ago
  The change to $750 just took effect July 1st. I suspect we're going to see some big discounts down to $400 or less around Black Friday and periodically at other times of the year. pCloud, a cloud storage provider who offers lifetime plans, uses a similar strategy. Basically I think they are putting the $750 price out there a) for anyone who is dumb enough to pay it, and b) as a way to make limited-time discounts and the annual plan seem like better deals by comparison.

walrus01 3mo ago

I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN. I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore the folders. There's a folder for movies, a folder for TV shows, and then stuff is organized within there by its directory name and filename. I double click on something I want to watch and it opens in VLC. Dead simple and works.

locksleydev 3mo ago
Clients on everything, watch history tracking, meta data collection, nicer player, quick transcode for mobiles and other portable media players you don't want 4k on, automatic subtitle collection, live TV DVR, and an interface so simple my grandmother can use it.
bombcar 3mo ago
Jellyfin is nice for various reasons (main for me is play synching) but Apple TV + Infuse + SMB share made something pretty bulletproof and kid friendly even before.
igorstellar 3mo ago
You’ve described NAS in general. It’s more than just file system. Plex gives you Media Library indexing, web app, mobile and TV apps to play content from your NAS, from anywhere in the world (it even includes Relay, in case you don’t have public IP or accessing NAT traversal).
- judge2020 3mo ago
  Even with public IP, it brokers an HTTPS certificate for you, which many smart TV platforms and OSes require for operation nowadays.
sasaf5 3mo ago
I have almost the same setup. Plus a 3rd party app called "Material Files" to access it on my phone.

hack1312 3mo ago

$750?!! Holy shit.

benoau 3mo ago
It's $980 if you buy it through Apple... and the crazy thing is Plex is actually losing $75 if you buy it that way!
- frutiger 3mo ago
  Losing $75 while gaining $675.
  - IAmBroom 3mo ago
    If your paycheck was shorted $75, you might care.

artisin 3mo ago

[dead]

spl757 3mo ago

I remember when Plex wasn't a money grab. Many moons ago.

zerof1l 3mo ago

Have to admit, quite impressive that someone is still paying this much for Plex given the free alternative like Jellyfin that can do pretty much everything the same. What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?

VPenkov 3mo ago
It's pretty slick looking which is worth something to me. Not $750, but something. But even though some of the UX choices of Jellyfin didn't make sense to me, it's an amazing piece of software, so I'm sticking with that, and using Wholphin [1] as a frontend. [1] https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin
dewey 3mo ago
I have a lifetime pass I bought many years ago for not much money, Plex had apps in all Platforms. Jellyfin does not at this point, even though there’s work being done everywhere. Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.
jerf 3mo ago
What information do you have that people are actually paying this price? There are plenty of situations where a business must charge over X for one reason and must charge under Y for another, where Y < X. What happens is generally they go for the "over X" branch for fairly obvious reasons, then go out of business sooner or later because they can't actually charge that. Just the fact that they are trying to charge that much doesn't mean people are paying it.
nvarsj 3mo ago
Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk. Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.

m4xp 3mo ago

How is that even a viable business model? I don't know a single self host person that would pay a subscription for something they are hosting

freetime2 3mo ago
According to this Forbes article [1], Plex earns the majority of their revenue from selling ads in their streaming platform: > Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business. So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market. Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerable-video-app-plex-emerges-as-fast-favorite/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerab... [2] https://www.plex.tv/plans/ https://www.plex.tv/plans/
- fg137 3mo ago
  I have seen people talking about this "hosting a small streaming service for friends" thing, and I really have trouble understanding that. It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it, even with a VPN, and I don't know what kind of friends they have. That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.
  - jonathanlydall 3mo ago

jorvi 3mo ago

My biggest beef with Plex is that they've pivoted away from being a media server first and are trying to change into a streaming platform first, and because managers inside the company have to show KPI, they're stuffing the streaming buttons and sections and recommendations in everywhere. Really frustrating because the media server experience is still by far the best. It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the streaming crap is disabled.

baggachipz 3mo ago
> It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the [enshittified] crap is disabled. This can apply to almost any modern application.
- hypercube33 2mo ago
  Try the Plezy app or the web server URL directly. For now it's far better. I believe you can disable the streaming garbage to some degree.
soggybread 3mo ago
Honestly, this is why I stopped using plex. I set up and ran my own server because I wanted to see the stuff I have, mostly digitized family VHS and then suddenly I'm finding movies and shows on my server that I didn't put there.
- unixhero 3mo ago
  To be fair you had to disable those feeds and then the content would not appear. User hostile move nonetheless.
_superposition_ 3mo ago
The only good thing about this in my setup is I can add shows/movies to my watchlist from their advertisements and it gets picked up by my arr stack.
- 3mo ago