For a good while, Plex was the only game in town that did the job well, and they put the transcoding feature behind the paywall.

Given it wasn't that expensive for a lifetime pass a number of years ago (I remember it was cheaper than a game anyway) and they still seemed relatively user-centric at the time, many people like me felt like they were supporting developers building something that was useful to us.

I still run my Plex server since it's not really costing me not to, but I've been running Jellyfin too for a little while and it more or less can do the same job these days

In the case of plex, it's not 100% selfhosted. There's a dependence on plexs public infrastructure for user management/authentication. They also help bypass NAT by proxying connections through their servers so you don't have to setup port forwarding and can even easily escape double NAT situations.

I can understand paying for that convenience, but cost keeps rising while previously free features continue to get locked behind paywalls.

Tbh, having users required to authenticate with plex.tv was enough for me to look elsewhere. The biggest reason to self host for me is to remove dependency on public services.

With Plex, you're getting the easy ability to grant access to users. You get a single pane that can search across multiple Plex instances, and NAT traversal/port forwarding. Jellyfin makes you figure that out yourself.

Immich has a weird "buy a licence" model which literally does nothing.

When they monitor what you watch and who you share it with, it’s enshittified. Fuck Plex. I used to be a lifetime drum thumper. Stopped a few years ago.

Plex doesn’t care about you, your comfort, ease. It wants your money and it wants to monitor and control what you do with your own data.

Fuck. That.

Take HomeAssistant for example: you’re free to use it self-hosted, but as soon as you want to expose it securely through the Internet, there’s need for infrastructure that has costs, both in materials and labor. In HomeAssistant’s case, it’s NabuCasa that does it, and costs money, and helps fund the work of HomeAssistant’s developers.

Having things free (libre) and open source is a blessing, but we have become used, entitled, even spoiled, to enjoy the work of very specialized people for free. That’s not always feasible.

Another example, Zabbix, is totally open source and free, they only charge for support and training if you ask for them. It has worked for them for many years, but if they start to struggle with funding, I’d understand if they charged for it.