New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing

tiernano

Glad i bought my pass when it was a lot lower (looks like i paid $75 back in 2013...).

rationalist

$750!!! It is currently $250 until July 1, 2026. It was $100 when I bought it back in 2022. Triple in price is crazy, especially that high of a price to stream your own content! At that price, I would be worried that they aren't doing too well financially. I would be worried that I paid that much only for the company to go under or limit its use a couple of years later.

fetus8

How can they justify an exponential price increase like this? The blog post doesn’t really mention new features aside from bringing features from the desktop website to the mobile app… Even though I bought my lifetime membership years ago, I think it’s time to explore other options. I don’t like this.

adampunk

>an important pricing update Would we all call it an upgrade?

orthoxerox

Why pay for Plex when Jellyfin exists?

drcongo

I bought a "lifetime" Plex pass for about $75 way back when, and within 6 months they'd banned my account for using a VPS for my media server. No way to appeal, no recourse. You'd have to be mad to give these scammers $750.

stego-tech

Yeah, no, that price does not justify the service. I got mine for $250. Plex worked great. Then they added streaming tie-ins and promotional services I didn’t ask for, making them opt-out instead of opt-in. They changed how my apps worked. They made my users sign up for Plex accounts instead of letting me manage them locally. They then tried making it appear like users had to pay to use my library, even though I had paid for a lifetime pass. Then they actually did make it require a Plex Pass to stream remote content. It’s my fucking content, Plex, and this nonsense is why I stood up Jellyfin as an escape hatch. Good fucking riddance.

charlesabarnes

I think this is fair with the amount of notice being given, but the price increase is very steep

dkuntz2

plex continues to prove their own irrelevancy

QGQBGdeZREunxLe

Plex has been completely broken for many people recently because they keep hitting Let's Encrypt API limits.

steviedotboston

Wow, I just checked and I paid $89.99 back in 2019. What kind of person thinks this is worth $750?

akersten

My favorite feature of Plex is that it resets the subtitle track to `None` when the next episode in a series starts. I love manually switching on the same named subtitle track every 30 minutes! $749 is actually too cheap for such an amazing feature.

majora2007

Steep price, but honestly makes a lot of sense. Lifetime licenses are never sustainable when you own a lot of infrastructure. Plex owns the auth, the reverse proxy infrastructure (to make it dead simple to setup), and a ton of development overhead and backend licensing deals. They obviously want to shift people to a monthly plan, but still give that lifetime. If I were to buy today vs when I originally, it would still be cost effective. There are alternatives, so users that don't want to shell up the 150$ now can jump over to. It's closed source software and the users have the opportunity to shift (or build a competing software that meets more of their core needs).

add-sub-mul-div

So soon after an abysmally bad and unpopular redesign? Why would I make a long term commitment to a platform that removes features and worsens over time?

stavros

Plex has slowly been going down the drain. I could be convinced to buy a lifetime pass for $90 (even if it's just for paying to watch my own content), but $750 is strictly "get outta here" territory. With how it's been stagnating recently, even the current prices are a hard sell for me, especially given how "lifetime" with tech companies tends to mean "~five years". I switched to Jellyfin and haven't looked back.

0xc133

I’m still salty that their last app platform rewrite dropped Watch Together as a supported feature. Server still supports it, browser clients still support it, as well as the older Plex apps if you were prescient enough to turn off automatic app updates and manually keep refusing to update the Plex app. This is a feature I use multiple times per week with friends who live states away. I can’t believe they just dropped it.

giobox

It's been death by many cuts for me with Plex. This follows the recent change where if a device on your network is not in the same IP range (say you have some clients on 192.168.1.x and some on 192.168.2.x, but on same subnet), Plex considers this to be remote access and demands payment now. I believe this is a response to users who run Plex on their own VPN rather than pay Plex the sub fee for their remote access solution. I'm not reconfiguring my LAN because Plex can't identify remote traffic accurately.

frizlab

Boy am I glad to be using Infuse.

monegator

LOL i just use kodi for my content. Data is on my router's hard drive, and before that it was some USB spinning rust attached to the ISP's router, and it just works (Well, TV series needs to be stored with the required folder structure / names to be recognized, but that's it) That's my usecase, so i never got the PLEX appeal (if i'm outside i just stream from the usual sources)

amiga386

I run Jellyfin because I want my media on my network and I don't want some intermediary getting any data about me or my friends or controlling what I can do.