Plex is increasing Plex Pass prices and paywalling remote playback for personal media at $1.99/month or $19.99/year.
Personal Media and Beyond You’re going to be hearing a lot from us this year—we’ve got a ton of exciting...
Well, that's Plex gone from my server, then. I had switched to Jellyfin, anyway, but it was mostly "still there".
No more.
Think I'd rather pay that towards the development of Jellyfin
I used to curse and scream at my jellyfin software and apps, now I swear by them.
I took a day out of my life, not even a full day lol, and just watched countless YouTube videos on how to set it up and how to customize it how I like.
Now it's my absolute favorite. I'm learning about building a home server and all that jazz now and I feel nostalgic, like a kid building his first computer lol!
Guess it's time I listen to all those jellyfin Fanboys
So they think it's acceptable to charge people to access their own files. Good Luck with that morons.
It is enshittification for sure. At the core it makes sense to not have it free, since dynamic DNS is not free. However it is a very small cost
Yeah this is why I don't use Plex.
At one point I installed it on my NAS. It goes through the setup, and then says I need to make a cloud account. Wtf? I am running locally hosted software on locally hosted hardware to access locally hosted files. Why do I need any cloud for this?
I don't. I uninstalled it.
I thought I read that there’s no charge if on the same network. It’s just for accessing your files remotely from other networks.
And if server host doesn't have premium.
I pay a dude to access his files 😎
As long as their not Plex's files I see no Issue that they should be compensated for.
So the media that I host is now no longer streamable when I am outside my home network? The fuck?
That's my server, my bandwidth, my electricity and they are blocking it?
That's enshittification for ya.
Meanwhile, all "lifetime pass" holders are encouraging this, while they have no skin in the game.
I'm not encouraging this at all. I've got a library of 5600 movies, 300 series, 300k songs I share with family. I have a lifetime pass I got last year, family doesn't need anything, apps stream free on TV's and browsers, only mobile had a few $ attached to it, which you can bypass using the browser. They all use tv/computer anyway.
That blows. I just use the Plex app on my TV for free streaming channels. 24/7 Top Gear reruns FTW!
And on that terrible disappointment, back to piracy.
Right now I’m watching Jeremy Clarkson drive a Peel P50 through a BBC office space.
Jellyfin is so much better anyway. I used plex for years and it has steadily enshitified.
Honestly I've tried jellyfin and I have a hard time agreeing with this for a few reasons:
I'll give you that morally jellyfin is less customer-adverse than Plex management is at the moment and it is more open in some ways so you can have more plugins and add-ons that Plex lacks, and sure it's a free product so it should be given some leeway.
... but if I just listened to all of the people saying jellyfin is just so much better I'd think it was an objectively better offering, but it's not. When it comes to what I care about, it fell short, so just giving my 2 cents. Still worth trying, considering you can just point it to the same media folders, and maybe there's a good proposition if you don't already have a Plex pass, but if you do and you're looking to migrate it's a tougher sell.
I agree with this. Add in also Apple TV options aren’t great. Swiftfin is just ok and Infuse is $
i’ve had none of those issues and i’ve been a jellyfin user for the past 5 years or so, but I do use containers for the server.
Android client is not great, but there are alternatives like Findroid, which is pretty great.
Last point is literally a couple of clicks. You just need to understand what libraries are and how to add them.
I tried jellyfin but didn't like it. Currently using emby and it works well.
I used Plex before I got tired of it requiring a remote network connection to work in my home network (no remote). I switched to emby a few years ago, and I'm tired of it too: Subtitle is a pain, filtering is a nightmare, integration with sonarr/radarr and configuration is annoying...
I've started developing my own streaming server, playback is working nice through the browser from server to tvlaptop. I'm going to integrate Transmission UI into it, and show/movie management, to get rid of sonnarr/radarr and maybe I'll manage to get rid of jackett too, so tired of this cumbersome stack. I want it all integrated into a single server with a single interface.
Could you explain why you feel that Jellyfin is a lot better? I’ve seen lots of folks saying it lately, but as someone with an unraid server running plex to back up and view my music and movie collections for years, I don’t get it. I’ve tried Jellyfin twice now. The most recent time was a couple of months ago. While it is good, I honestly have a hard time seeing what makes it much better than Plex. While I disagree with a number of things Plex has done, I still recommend it to friends who want a personal media server or place to rip and backup their CDs to. It’s still the easiest to setup and most intuitive imo. Am I just missing something?
The most infuriating thing about Plex for me was when they shifted to force you to start with their BS streaming service at open. I only used Plex for my personal media collection. So having to jump through a bunch of menus to get to the only thing I want to use in their app was the biggest reason to switch for me. Maybe there is a way to fix that, but I could never find one.
Jellyfin just does your personal media library and opens right up into it when the app starts. Its simpler, faster, and FOSS.
Agreed. Started out in Plex when j knew nothing about self hosting, very quickly made the switch to Jellyfin and haven't looked back. If I'm hosting my media, storing it locally, and running my own server, I'm much better off not integrating the software of some company that feels entitled to bleed some extra revenue from me.
RIP Plex
That $75 Lifetime Plex Pass is looking like a good decision by past me.
Until they remove or add something that this tier doesn't get.
Jellyfin is the future.
Well, sounds like I have six weeks to spin up Jellyfin side-by-side with Plex to see if I can get away with not paying the $120 ransom...
https://jellyfin.org/ Great alternative to Plex!
I paid for a lifetime Plex Pass years and years ago now, I've definitely gotten my money's worth.
That being said, I fully expect more bullshit like this, up to and including ending my "lifetime" pass.
When that comes to pass, I'm so glad Jellyfin will be available for me to use.
Wish they had a client for PS5.
Unfortunately, Sony seems to be really hostile towards allowing most any video player apps on the PS5. They specifically went out of their way to remove DLNA support, and they only just allowed a DLNA-enabled video player on the store 7 months ago... and it's subscription based.
That's the biggest reason I haven't switched to Jellyfin.
I have a lifetime Plex pass.
I tried out Jellyfin last month.
Now Plex is uninstalled.
Even if we ignore the differences when it comes to matters of FOSS, cost, corporate control, privacy, etc, Jellyfin’s performance is just so much better.
Setting it up to run over https while fully self-hosted was a learning process for somebody who isn’t a web dev, but holy crap was it worth it.
It's just not the same. If all you need is local access or tailscale to your instance it's fine, sure you can cancel Plex. If you're sharing with friends or family or like the easy access to it that doesn't require being part of the private network. Also I like subtitles and Plex handles this way better than Jellyfin. At least last time I played with it
There were some hoops for me to jump through in order to get secure remote access working for sure. Fortunately for my family that connect remotely, it’s transparent for them and doesn’t require any kind of VPN or tunnel. They just need URL, user, and password.
And for subtitles I’m not sure what the differences are between the two, but I’ve used them plenty on jellyfin and they seemed to work well and render nicely.
I tried Jelly Fin last month based on a thread here and it was a damned dumpster fire. As bad a Plex is for remote streaming, JF is far worse for the average person.
Plex is the current war front. May it hold for many years
the idea of stockpiling a lifetimes AV entertainment being within normie's grasp must have media congloms terrified. Problem is - that accessibility poses risks for us filesharers too, cause a panicked animal is an aggressive one
I installed Plex a couple years ago and when I found I actually had to sign into their servers to access my own content it was immediately uninstalled. It was only a matter of time before they pulled this kind of shit.
This was my exact experience as well. I'll never know how Plex compares to Jellyfin because I immediately noped out when I ran into the account creation.
Frankly baffling to me that anyone with the wherewithal to self host thought that was okay.
you can disable authentication on your local network.
This might be a good time to remind everyone that Jellyfin is open source, free (as in beer) and is, at this point, a better media streamer than Plex. No fees, no ads, no constant pushing of their streaming content, and still has the watch together feature that Plex went and removed.
TBH Plex is years ahead on maturity, their dev team is excellent, unfortunately it seems like enshittification has begun for them.
Support Jellyfin not because it’s better, but because it’s open source and it puts users and tech first. Don’t expect it to beat Plex’s performance, quality, or cross-platform availability yet, but expect it to become better as more people donate or get involved.
I cannot upvote this enough. "Just migrate to X, it's every bit as good!" when end users know it's not is a disingenuous argument and even if they don't have the technical know-how to explain exactly why they feel this way, they'll feel the deception. It only reinforces a growing distrust in tech.
The argument has to be made honestly. It's not quite as good, but almost. Those few things you'll miss will require an adjustment, but the overall value (a lot of times just literally, it costs less!) will become evident.
I know we're all Linux nerds here and enthused to get people onboard, but the battle right now we're facing is one of trust and security and must be grounded in those notions because while great strides have been made in convenience and accessibility, big corps will always be able to bankroll themselves over those points.
The only thing Plex has on Jellyfin are client apps. Sever-side… Jellyfin hands down. I was super surprised to see av1 transcoding support… In Plex we JUST got HEVC.
I’m not hating on Plex by any means, but when I have an issue with Plex, Jellyfin picks up the slack. I’ll be using Jellyfin full time after the ATV app re-write.
I am curious, though, what is it that makes you think Jellyfin’s software is inferior? Since I’ve been following, Jellyfin has released new features long before Plex.
Its weird how people complain more with the current state of plex compared to if they just required a plex pass for everything.
My ONLY complaints are that they have new features enabled by default, and that it doesn't work well if the internet breaks
The is just better rhetoric gets a bit frustrating tbh, it's a great bit of software do not get me wrong, but sure still has a lot of issues with more exotic codecs and various colour space conversions. Among some other tech issues
Yea as expected
New USD prices as of April 29, 2025 will be:
Monthly: $6.99
Yearly: $69.99
Lifetime: $249.99
Oof I paid $75 in 2013 for lifetime lol.
I like how no one is mentioning that they removed the one time fees for their mobile apps to be able to play media at all. Also, only the server owner needs Plex Pass and anyone they share with can stream for free.
The US$75 Lifetime price has traditionally been their Black Friday deal, regardless of the usual price.
Anyone's guess if that deal will still be a thing, given their recent behaviour, though.
Me too 🫢
Paid 99, worst investment i did till now.
Jellyfin is free. Your own domain is like $10 a year or less.
Tailscale is also free.
Possibly a bit annoying for family members used to just logging in though. It's an extra step.
If you don't mind connecting directly with your IP address, you don't even have to pay a domain. Been doing this for around 2 years
Just shared in another comment, instead of doing this you can also use http://playit.gg/ to create a proxy without requiring an account and also not requiring port forwarding. They lease you a domain name, too
How else would they continue developing their social features that no one fucking asked for?
Meanwhile they remove the social features that people DO like and use like watch together
People gotta justify their jobs!
There's enough work without them going all social.
Todays word of the day is.....Enshitification!
That's the word of this decade.
i’ve been struggling with what i thought was depression/anhedonia for a few years now. after multiple psychiatrists and meds accomplishing nothing i am starting to think i’m chemically just fine; the world is actually going to shit around me.
.. with 3 Ts
I paid for a lifetime membership to Plex in 2012--$75. I stopped using it around 2015, mostly because I hated that I didn't have access to software running on my server, meant to serve my media, without an internet connection. I knew that meant worse was coming in the future.
I don't regret switching to Jellyfin.
You can access locally when the internet is down. You just need to set the login bypass for the local network. IMO it’s kinda a stupid step needed in setup but it is available.
I'm not sure I understand the need for charging to play media on a private server when not on the local network. Why is this no longer going to be free? I'm glad I bought a lifetime pass many many years back but I definitely wouldn't pay for Plex nowadays with alternatives being comparable. What a silly choice they made~
I’m not defending them because it’s a shit move, but they clearly understand the most valuable feature is not their ad-ridden free content but rather the original value prop of the service to make it easy to share personal media with small groups of friends.
It reeks of "we're routing your traffic through our own servers to check your media for piracy" to me.
Why would they check for piracy when it's not them you're pirating from and stopping piracy would remove the most popular use case of their product?
I run jellyfin in a container and it is amazing. Give it a try.
I've found it hogs a bit of resources so I shut mine off until Plex crossed a line
Looks like that day came sooner than I expected
What run command did you use? Any resource constraints?
I just run it in default config basically. To be honest it's just the normal docker container I hadn't noticed any crazy resource usage but then in not able to compare that to Plex itself.
I see Jellyfin suggested as an alternative to Plex here. I hope it is one day.
At the moment it’s nowhere close.
I’ve been running Jellyfin side-by-side Plex for two years and it’s still not a viable replacement for anyone but me. Parents, my partner, none of the possible solutions for them come anywhere near close to the usability of Plex and its ecosystem of apps for various devices.
That will likely change because plex is getting worse every day and folks can contribute their own solutions to the playback issues. With plex it’s more noise, more useless features. So one gets better (Jellyfin) and one gets worse (Plex).
But at the moment it really isn’t close for most folks who are familiar with the slickness of commercial apps.
Even from the administrative side, Jellyfin takes massively more system resources and it doesn’t reliably work with all my files.
Again, Jellyfin will get there it’s just not a drop in replacement for most folks yet.
And for context I started my DIY streaming / hosting life with a first gen Apple TV (pretty much a Mac mini with component video outs) that eventually got XBMC and then Boxee installed on it. I even have the forksaken Boxee box.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but in what ways is Jellyfin vastly inferior to Plex? I haven't used Plex before but Jellyfin does everything me and my family need from a streaming service.
I tried Jellyfin a few months back as a Plex replacement, but I can’t seem to get reliable playback on iPad/iOS. I’ve tried the native app, Infuse and Swiftfin to no avail. On the rare occurrence the app finds and connects to the server(over local network), they don’t seem to support transcoding of non-native formats such as x265. Can anyone confirm they have this working on iOS?
It'd probably different for everyone, but in my case, its smart collections and playlists. My family lives off the home screen and pretty much never venture beyond it. Jellyfin cannot do smart collections and the home screen is very bare bones and unpolished. In Plex I have smart collections and playlists that build automatically for them all pinned neatly to the home screen.
The Jellyfin clients are also unpolished in general and buggy. The server works great though. No problems with that.
Was trying to get a friend to switch to jellyfin the other day and it turns out he's got a weird Hisense projector that uses VIDAA OS, which does not have a jellyfin app, but DOES have a Plex app. I imagine setups like this are probably limiting Jellyfin's adoption. VIDAA is actually less niche than I thought as well, heaps of cheap-ish TVs and projectors are running it.
I mean, that’s like, your opinion man… I prefer Jellyfin.
But that’s exactly my point - we here in this bubble prefer Jellyfin - but it’s not ready for mass adoption. Even plex is a drop in the bucket.
Does Jellyfin have good skip intro functionality for TV shows? That was the main thing keeping me from switching last time I considered a couple years ago
Yes, Intro Skipper plugin. It's awesome.
There’s an extension/plugin that you can install for that. I have been meaning to do that, but I keep forgetting, so I can’t say how good it is.
Deceptive title. If the person hosting the server has Plex pass then it's still free for other users to use remote playback.
I have Plex running but this change means I can no longer access my own shit remotely with paying for their shitty sub.
Thankfully Jellyfin is here. Plex can fuck right off.
How is it deceptive? No plex pass on the server? No remote streaming.
It's deceptive because it leaves out the most important part. That is if you aren't using the free version of Plex (AKA you have the lifetime pass), this doesn't affect you. It's a non-issue for anyone smart enough to get lifetime subscription.
These seem like reasonable changes
They are updating the app at some point, which is removing the watch together feature. I wonder what else may disappear.
No love for Emby here?
I have a lifetime membership to Emby premium. I just switched to Jellyfin. Emby is kind of dead in the water as far as development. Not abandoned but not really forging ahead. And it doesn't have as much community plug-in support. If you like the features as they are, it's a good platform. I got enough years out of my premium payment to not fully regret it, but I'm not going to let it anchor me to a stale feature set. I don't need the support and I can always fall back to it if I have to.
It increases on April 29th, so if you still want to buy a lifetime pass at the current rate, you have until then.
No you don't. I've shared with people and I've never had a pass.
So Plex just killed itself? Got it. Lmao bye Felicia nobody's paying the middleman for shit they are hosting on their OWN FUCKING HARDWARE.