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Plex’s price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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I never understood why you would pay to do things that you can do for free
I give money to LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Armbian, the Wikipedia, and so on. I don't have to, but it shows my appreciation, and maybe helps them do more in some small way.
I dont have a problem with donations, thats different from "you must pay me to use my thing". As donations is an opt in, I would do that. Paying to host my own content on my own server is taking the piss
Purchasing is an opt in too. I use both but paid for a Plex lifetime pass almost 10 years ago. It was easier to set up remote access. Setting up a server was new to me at the time so anything I could find that made it easier was worth it. I also bought an unRAID lifetime pass for the same reason (among other reasons).
I've been on a lifetime Plex subscription for the last 15 years. The only nothing preventing me from switching to Jellyfin (I have it running in parallel) is giving elderly family members, who live in 3 other countries than me, access.
If I were to start today though, I would not even consider Plex though, but momentum is a bitch.
I used plex for over a year before spending 80€ on a lifetime supscription. So it was a okay proposition for me, espacially as jellyfin still misses features plex had back then.
I switched to jellyfin after plex broke my setup with some verification change. Still missing some features, but atleast i dont have to deal with entshitification.
Two reasons:
because "free" often means there is an ulterior motive for providing the service (see: search)
because developers need to eat, and servers cost money. Paying for goods and services helps keep them from collapsing under their own weight.
Big for profit businesses are generally bad, but small dev teams transparent about their costs just trying to live comfortably? They can have my money.
Maybe this is true for some cases, but it's not for jellyfin. It's simply open source and free like tons of other utilities people work on for the fun of it. If it were closed source maybe you'd be right.
Agree on number 2 though.
Because paid versions are often better and for many people those improvements are worth it.
Because the free version usually isn't as good.
Jelly fin, as of a year ago, was still using a mouse cursor for remote use. It was a dumpster fire compared to Plex. And that's before you have to include hosting a reverse fucking proxy to share.
You want me to go through the full list of shit that's been broken on my steam deck? A device that should be polished and ready to the consumer? Do you think shit like steak decks are as polished and easy to use as a switch?
It's not hard to figure out if you drop the biases that come with most foss community members.
My steam deck can play more Nintendo games than my switch.
hosting a proxy server is part of self hosting, so I would to that anyway. asking me to pay for that is not going to fly
I pay for a lot of things that I don't have to, for many reasons. Paying for piracy tho, that's something I'm sort of unwilling to do.
Some people will pay for a vpn, for exactly that purpose. And it’s worth it because you don’t have to use 30 different streaming services and 30 different apps to find what you want to watch. And it’s all hosted in the same format.
And that's not even mentioning usenet.. Paying for piracy in many cases can just be overall better
Do people still use Usenet?
Yes, quite a lot do. It is just a faster, more secure, and more reliable experience compared to torrenting
Is there like a quick guide for this?
I know how this sounds with where we are currently.. but reddit's /r/usenet has alot of good guides and round ups. That's what I used back in the day, before the exodus that brought me here a couple years ago
You don't pay for a VPN, HDDs, Usenet, etc?
No VPN because where I live it's unnecessary, I pay for HDDs but you would with Plex as well, aside from that I use my server for other stuff as well, and I don't use Usenet, so yeah.