Jellyfin has lots and lots of tutorials, fyi. it’s not as intimidating as it seems once you get going with it.
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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And Plex doesn't require any. It's okay to accept that one product can be more polished than the other, and Plex has a lot of stuff that "just works"
My comment wasn’t for you then, it’s for people curious in an alternative but may be hesitant. Some people enjoy learning new things.
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
I “defend” plex against silly complaints, but jesus christ that is one giant leap for no gain. That’s stupid, no one will pay that - though I tend to think that’s the whole point.
I got this on Black Friday many years ago for ~70 and despite the pass I am slowly moving over to Jellyfin. I really don't see how they came up with this valuation, seems like a last money squeeze before abandoning ship.
They don’t want lifetime licenses to sell, they want monthly subscriptions from everyone.
The Jellyfin vs Plex thing always struck me as odd. As in - why are we holding JF to a different standard to (say) Immich, Syncthing, Pi-hole or any one of a thousand different programs people self host?
Yes, JF ships multi-user accounts and client apps etc. I get it, "multi-use" is implied, so the comparison isn't totally unfair. But there's a difference between 'this feature exists' and 'this is the primary purpose of the tool'.
The fact that you CAN share it externally doesn't mean everyone running JF is doing that, or that it should be the benchmark the whole project is judged by.
To me, self host means "I host it, myself" not "I host it and then pretend to be Netflix for family and friends". If that's the use case, then of course, Plex away.
It's cool that you CAN share JF externally, and it's cool that Plex does that differently / better. We shouldn't hold one to the standards of the other.
Just out of interest as someone who has recently set up a Jellyfin server - what's the main "value add" of using Plex compared to Jellyfin?
It seems to do everything I want, so I'm not sure why people would pay for Plex over the FOSS version.
Plexamp is just far superior for music. It doesn’t even come close sadly … since I only use it for my music collection I simply prefer Plex … but only because I got lifetime a long time ago for 60 bucks or something …
Realistically the only advantage of Plex is being able to watch it over the internet without a VPN. Which means it makes it easier to get friends and family access to your server or to access it yourself from random smart tvs outside your house.
If you only watch at home or have a fire stick that you take with you to watch abroad or your friends/family members have one and can setup a VPN on it it's not needed.
For me, the killer app for Plex is Plexamp, the music client. It's superb, and AFAIK Jellyfin doesn't really have an equivalent (there are 3P options, but they're lacking).
For me (Android) I have used these:
- Finamp
- Default Jellyfin App
- Symfonium
And Symfonium can do many sources and is the moat powerful.
Finamp is neat but couldnt do casting to my soundbar via google cast
Symfonium with Jellyfin all the way!
I have a navidrome server. Nothing, really nothing comes close to Plexamp and its features … sadly … but they all ain’t bad and got the basic stuff right
Ease of use, and actual secure and usable external access.
Friends/family make an account and tell you their account name or email address, you invite them to your library and that’s it, they can watch/listen to your media on pretty much any device they have. No vpn needed.
Jellyfin is not meant to be exposed to the internet for remote viewing. It also doesn’t have a client on most devices people use to watch tv/movies.
Are you accessing your media from outside of your network?
I have heard that you need to set up a VPN for Jellyfin to securely use your media library remotely. Plex handles all of that for me so that I don't need to deal with it.
I do not, and don't plan to. Probably wouldn't be that hard to set up though as someone familiar with nginx.
I guess Plex uses their own VPN under the hood then to make it more convenient?
Seems funny that they continue to increase the price as that value sharply declines with the limited life left in it.
A gentle reminder that Jellyfin exists to those thinking of alternatives.
As someone who picked up lifetime for like $45 or whatever it was (I think a 50% off sale?) what must have been 15 years ago...
I run jellyfin. Its just a better experience IMO.
I’m sorry but you can hate Plex and prefer jellyfin all you want, but you don’t have to lie. Nothing about jellyfin is a “better experience” than Plex.
What are some examples?
For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex
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
It’s not better in any way other than cost. That cost comes with massive drawbacks.
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.
Supporting software that you use by paying for it?
Ew.
/kidding
I’m a very happy lifetime membership owner and have zero problem with them removing features from the free version. Free doesn’t pay the bills unless you want to become the product.
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.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean Plex will do it.
Except when I bought my lifetime it meant lifetime for the SERVICE, not the app...
Did it. I don't remember it saying that. And I bought it around the same time as you since I paid the same price.
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I know that whales exist, but seriously... Who is into self hosting but also into dropping $750 on a service that can end on a whim?
They dont want you to buy lifetime they want you to pay month to month.
So basically, they just want to phase our the lifetime plan, but they know removing it outright would cause outrage so they "just" increase the price to massively lower interest and then say: "Well nobody wanted it so we removed the product".
I swear to god plex and the profiteering sons of bitches behind it can go fuck themselves.
The make more off of FAAS then lifetime sub's. More of their users are FAAS users them stream your own.
The company's blog post also described a number of improvements they plan to make
After you pay: "oops, we won't"
As a lifetime owner, the number of features they've deprecated is probably the worst part.
- Photo support (luckily Immich came along)
- Tidal integration (no idea if that was Plex or Tidal's decision)
- Plugins (god forbid anyone add the functionality they keep removing)
It's close between that and the last app overhaul that removed a bunch of functionality.
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.
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.
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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?
Could they at least send the fun ones like Godzilla and aliens?
I do not think late stage capitalism was one of the endings, so I second the fun disasters.
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