this post was submitted on 01 May 2025

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That's all folks, Plex is starting to charge for sharing (poptalk.scrubbles.tech)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

679 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639

I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That's it folks. I've been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.

They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.

I'll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I've been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it's time to make it production ready.

Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.

And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:

YES I know I'm unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don't understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn't have to, that's why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
Plex is still removing functionality. I don't care that "People should pay their fair share". If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that's completely okay. They are removing functionality.
- "But they have cloud costs". Remote streaming is negligible to them. It's a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That's it.
- "Good luck finding another remote streaming" - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that's a separate conversation). All "remote streaming" is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported "free" content that they're probably losing money on.

In short, I don't care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They're removing functionality that has been free for years. I'm not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago

The beginning of enshittification.

Prices will keep climbing, functionality reduced in favor of service tiers, and of course ads, ads, and ads.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I'm coming up on 5 years as a Plex pass owner, so my users and I will not be impacted by this change. In five more years if they asked me nicely to pay another $89 to support the service I would. Send me some stickers and put a badge on my server. I get a lot of use out of the software/service, as do my family members.

I will say, I am quite annoyed at the wording and audience of this email. Jellyfin is just not an option for me until there is excellent feature parity with Plex. I know they are a lot of Jellyfin fans here, in my opinion, Plex is a significantly better experience for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Exactly, most people that share co tent with others already have the Plex pass so this doesn't do anything to them or their users.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Couldn't have said it better myself. I used plex for free for the better part of a decade. Bought lifetime when a raise was coming and it was still $140 (kicking myself because at one point with a sale I was looking at something like $45).

I've used plex pass enough, and it's my main driver for all our entertainment outside of music and audiobooks that if they asked for some more money, I wouldn't care so much.

The ease of use, the UI, and remote access without having to jump through a bunch of hoops is worth it.

No shade to Jellyfin, but it's not nearly as dumb dumb friendly.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

I've used it briefly in the past but with all the streaming services popping up and prices going up I thought it will be a matter of time for Plex to follow suit. So I moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. I kept account (ok I forgot about it) but when I saw that email today in my mailbox I just logged in and deleted it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Wonder how long those 2.99 a month figures will last. I give it a year before there's no seperate remote streaming package and the only remaining one is >10$. The main appeal of Plex was not paying. It's used by pirates. The goal is content for free. It's no longer free. I don't care at all if random people can use my Plex server. If they are unwilling to adapt to a new platform, then I guess they'll resubscribe to Netflix. Most of them never unsubscribed from Netflix to begin with.

This was the end for me. Used Plex for almost a decade. I'm off to Jellyfin. It's actually almost no change whatsoever to integrate it into my home setup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

If you bought a Plex pass in the past your users won't notice a difference. And I assume most server owners did it for the hardware encoding alone

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Indeed, no need to have Plex anymore. Will probably set up a family VPN and we can all stream directly from my harddrives, bandwidth is not an issue anyway.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

No need to abandon all the user-friendly aspects of a self-hosted streaming platform. Just use Jellyfin. I switched to it from Plex years ago and have never looked back.