Plex has announced a massive price increase on the service’s Lifetime Plex Pass. On July 1, the lifetime subscription option will go from $249.99 to $749.99, an increase of 200%. The price hike will only apply to new subscribers, with no changes to monthly or annual subscription pricing.
Jellyfin
A gentle reminder that Jellyfin exists to those thinking of alternatives.
For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex
If you use it weekly it shouldn’t be free to you, certainly if you use it more frequently than that. Give money to the projects you depend on or they will disappear.
If you ignore the mostly horrendous UI, the security problems, the worse transcoding performance, the harder setup, the difficulty to access it remotely in a safe way,… Yeah sure, way better
there are a lot of us still on Plex that hadn’t reached the threshold of issues vs effort that would motivate us to migrate to something like jellyfin.
looks like we’ve arrived.
Why not run both? That’s what I do, then if Plex is an issue for someone I can make them a Jellyfin account
I haven’t. I bought lifetime Plex Pass something like 15 years ago. A price change doesn’t effect me. It’s all their shitty updates and removing of features that makes me keep an eye on Jellyfin. I already have a sync setup for my watch status and a couple of my main users. Jellyfins apps are still worse.
I already have a lifetime Plex pass so this isn’t an issue for me. 6 months from now when Plex decides my lifetime pass has a new expiry, then I’ll be motivated.
this exactly. I got a lifetime pass in the before times (pre-pandemic) back when they were $100 bucks ish, but I know it’s only a matter of time before they come for us grandfathered-in fools.
Never used Plex. Jellyfin has always met my needs, so I never bothered to try it.
I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of the $74.99 I paid for Plex Pass Lifetime several years ago. If they ever get rid of my Plex Pass and try to say “Lifetime didn’t actually mean Lifetime”, I’ll be gone.
We’ve seen other companies pull this move by saying “lifetime” only applies to X version.
The company’s blog post also described a number of improvements they plan to make
After you pay: “oops, we won’t”
Jellyfin isn’t great, but it sure doesn’t have this problem.
I never thought those leopards would eat MY face.
are they insane?
From a purely profit-oriented perspective, no. They’re setting up a pretext to eliminate the lifetime license plan due to a lack of interest. No sane person would pay that kind of lump sum for the service (and the insane ones will bring in triple the revenue), so they’ll claim that there is no market for it. After that, they’re free to crank up the periodic subscription prices.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.
it’s their own product, who are they pretending to fool?
Stakeholders. Journalists. The market. The ignorant public. They’re constructing a narrative to shield themselves and minimize the hit to their reputation when they stop offering lifetime license plans. The announcement won’t look nearly as damning if it contains a reference to the falling number of new lifetime customers, even if it omits the context of why that number has been falling.
So they are “shielding” themselves from a reputation drop by making an incredibly naked attempt and pushing the price to the roof so nobody wants it?
I mean, come on… if they had increased it $20 by $20 until nobody wants it, I would buy your hypothesis, but this is like pooping on my Director’s desk while he is in the office to get fired
How is this less blatant than just announcing they are cancelling life time subscriptions? or even better, just removing the option without any announcement?
They wanna gentle into it somewhat because they know there are many server managing people on the line already, doubting going jellyfin but scared of the hassle of transferring users, incompatibility (or too difficult for user) with some users devices.
They wanna move fast because money line needs to go up, boss said.
So currently, tripling lifetime prices seems to be the middle way for them. After a while monthly and yearly prices will rise too (but slower than tripling).
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.
Does this already have a name? If not, can we call it “Riccitiello’s Law”?
Not really. Their plan for a while now is to convert all to subscriptions and this is just their latest salvo. Next up is getting rid of it completely due to “no demand” and then kicking existing lifetime accounts to some static version that won’t be supported.
then why not just do that? who are they pretending to fool?
Good point! Everyone that sees the news on this is either going to already be using Plex or not internalize it because it isn’t relevant to them.
It seems like they’re jumping through an awful lot of hoops to bamboozle some tiny number of potential customers that happen to be in the market for self-hosted media streaming right then at the time of the announcement of the end of the lifetime subscription.
Yes.
Isn’t that 300%
With the original price as $250, a 100% increase would be adding the entire value to itself once (i.e doubling) taking us to $500.
A 200% increase is adding the $250 to the original two times for a total of $750.
So calling it a “200% increase” is correct.
It is true to say that “$750 is 300% of $250” or that “The price has tripled” - both correct, but the increase is only 200% because increase doesn’t include the original as part of the value.
This makes perfect sense, thank you
TBH—and I’m not a native English speaker—I think it’s a bit ambiguously phrased. “Increase by 200%” would be more clear.
Fine. Forget about it.
Enshittification in action.
enshitification isnt price hike all their “fonctionality” nobody were asking for are
they must be tired of running that company.
Is the whole world right now like me at the very end of a SimCity 3000 game, when it’s time to just turn on all the catastrophies?
Its so much less cool than that.
Business leaders have finally gotten the legal oversight landscape set up so the cash register is being monitored by a blind baby that was dropped on its head, so they’re all just lining up robbing the place.
The end-game plan seems to be to keep it up until things go all Mad Max, then hide in underground vaults until that blows over and start it again.
Probably going to get hate for this. But I have easily gotten 750 dollars worth of value out of my lifetime subscription. I’m sure they are doing this to drive down lifetime subscriptions and increase month to month. But I legit think 750 over 20 years it’s still a legit price.
the thing I hate the most about news like this is all the jellies screaming out “I iNsTaLlEd JeLlYfIn BeCaUsE i KnEw ThIs WoUlD hApPeN!”
we get it. you sniff your own farts.