50
Lifetime Plex Pass Increasing From $250 to $750
(www.plex.tv)
certified lmao at plex users
a media streaming service is the biggest reason I set up my home server in the first place, and when I was first getting started, jellyfin vs plex was the easiest decision of my life. do I go with the weird corporate closed-source paid license platform, or do I go with the foss equivalent that's just as good?
Jellyfin was a much less obvious choice 15-20 years ago
Jellyfin was a much less obvious choice 5-10 years ago. It's really gotten comparable in just the last few years. But that's the joy of open source, it can only ever get better from here. Plex on the other hand 😬
True, true. I'm gonna have to move off it eventually for sure. Whenever I have the extra memory I plan to run a jelly in parallel to plex so I can find and patch any shortcomings.
It's basically a streaming service now but you also provide the hardware and internet.
so wait, do plex users really have to authenticate or some shit on an external server to watch their own locally hosted media? as in, if your internet goes down, you can't even watch your own local media?
and people still use this shit?
that's like instead of lego, they give you duplo, and the duplo is crazy glued to the bottom of the toybox.
It's free if you just want to watch on your local network (for now). The pay features are to be able to stream off-network (and a few other things). Still outrageous.
If they still block hw encoding it makes it non starter for anything outside of tv tbh
Absurd. I still remember when a lifetime Plex Pass could be had for $75. Every time I hear something about Plex in the news, it's either about another price increase, or about them putting another previously free feature behind a paywall.
Don't forget the data breaches!
What is this product? I have been at sea for years and haven't followed the newest filching attempts by capital.
Plex is an app for your personally owned video and music files. It has a decent interface and you can share your library with friends. You need to have your own server at home, but plex apps can’t run independently without being logged into the plex external server.
The plex pass is essentially paying for transcoding your media into more streamable formats.
Sounds like a security risk to me, to expose my (of course very legal) files to some rando internet company.
Agreed.
plex apps can’t run independently without being logged into the plex external server
lmao, that is so much worse than i imagined.
It's like having a streaming service GUI but for all of your pirated content for when you're watching tv on the couch. Will categorize, populate descriptions of shows etc etc
Okay, thank you for explaining. It sounds highly unnecessary.
It also has social features so you can access your friend's media servers from the same interface. It was much cheaper when I started using it tho and jellyfijellyfish n was not nearly as nice as it is nnow. o
Stremio does the same thing and I don't even have to keep the files downloaded.
I'm a dum-dum and even I was able to set up a Jellyfin server ~~2~~ 3 years ago and have been enjoying it ever since. I only fuck with local streaming, but I know you can set up a VPN and remote in and share it with family/friends that way.
Jellyfin has just worked for me, and I like that about it. I also really like not relying on some third party authentication server and paying $750 for the privilege.
That is a huge price jump.
I'd consider jellyfin, but my main issues with jellyfin are
-
my friends aren't on it. Plex has the cool sharing of media libraries thing with friends so I can see a bunch of different friend's libraries at once. Not sure if jellyfin has that. And if it does, I'd still have to convince all my friends to move their libraries to jellyfin from plex. And
-
the UI isn't as good. It's not as pretty, it's kind of boring.
I also heard it doesn't have as many features, but I'm not sure how true that is, besides plex having good music library features. I haven't experimented enough with that yet to know if anything I'd actually use is missing.
my friends aren't on it. Plex has the cool sharing of media libraries thing with friends so I can see a bunch of different friend's libraries at once. Not sure if jellyfin has that. And if it does, I'd still have to convince all my friends to move their libraries to jellyfin from plex. And
Jellyfin uses a different user management system than Plex does because there's no "central service" that users register an account to. Instead Jellyfin expects administrators to manage users of their own server. As the administrator of your server you can add or delete users, modify their permissions and set some basic access controls, lock them out, etc. In your case you would provision user accounts on your Jellyfin server for your friends and provide credentials to them.
the UI isn't as good. It's not as pretty, it's kind of boring.
Agreed, but it's very easy to either customize the theme yourself since it's just CSS, or find a theme that better suites your taste.
Hope that clears somethings up for you.
Jellyfin is a decent alternative to Plex for sure. My bigger issue is with Clients. They sort of vary in quality from things like the Roku client crashing all the time, to there not even being an official Apple TV client. I would still prefer Jellyfin over $70/yr or $750 one off lol
there is jellyswarm btw (but switching servers is rather easy, it's setting them up for internet accessibility is annoying)
I think it was $100 about 20 years ago or so when i bought it
I procrastinated on buying the lifetime pass the last time they jacked prices. They worded the email weird and made it sound like the deadline was a day later than it really was.
Whatever kinda on me. But I emailed them and admitted my mistake, said if they could extend a bit of grace I’d buy a lifetime pass right here and now at $120. They said no, but then on Reddit tons of other people got the old price honored when they asked.
So I switched to Enby, which is cleaner and just as easy, and then I joined a class action against Plex for giving data to Facebook and I got, ironically, $120 bucks from them.
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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