this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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Wow, I got the Plex pass 15 years ago for like $70.
It is absurd to see it is over $700 dollars now.
I imagine it's to discourage the purchase of plex life time. But there's something about this that is feels so bad man.
I have spun up Jellyfin to run alongside Plex and I'm ready to switch over full time in case Plex ever goes after the old life time users. You just never know with these days.
And tbh, Jellyfin is pretty awesome. It seems to run lighter and faster than Plex. Nobody should be buying a $700 pass to watch your own content.
I paid $100 a handful of years ago, and it felt worth it at the time. Jellyfin has improved tremendously in that time, adding intro/outro skip, a tizen app, better collections support, and is super snappy comparatively. I thought my streaming server was to blame for the long buffer times at the start of media, but clearly not because Jellyfin starts almost as soon as the player loads in. Plex has gotten worse, more invasive, more expensive, and more sluggish since then. I'll never look back to Plex. What value they offer on top of Jellyfin's functionality (which is shrinking year by year) isn't worth the $2 per phone per month for my new users. I made the switch for ~20 family/friends, and other than the name, people only had praises for Jellyfin.
Your users don’t have to pay anything if you have a Plex pass…….
Also I doubt you have other users, externally, if you switched to jellyfin as it’s not made for that, nor should it be used for that.
As far as I know they do for remote streaming on phones, if they weren't part of my server at the time they introduced the monthly remote streaming subscription. I tried to add a new user after it was introduced, and to use Plex to access content from my server on their phone they no longer had the option to pay the $5 or whatever, they had to sign up for a $2 a month subscription. I don't know if this may have been walked back in the last few months, but at the time it was true.
I don't sell access or anything like that, I've just got friends and family with access. It fluctuates, but right now it's sitting at 17 external accounts. I host on the public internet. Despite it being not recommended in general, it's actually safe to do so if proper precautions are taken. (Correct firewall settings, force https, reverse proxy, scheduled updates, etc.) There are a few extra things I do, but just those should be safe enough if your users aren't reusing passwords.
No, before the remote pass they had to pay a one-time fee, but since they added the remote pass subscription as long as the plex server admin has a plex pass no-one has to pay a cent.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/requirements-for-remote-playback-of-personal-media/
So you've put your server/networks security in the hands of 17 other people's password policies, and you think that's "actually safe to do so if proper precautions are taken"?
I've got 20+ friends and family who use my Plex server, only a few have ever paid a cent (when they had the one time fee for mobile streaming), and my server and networks security is not at the risk of someone using the password "password".
It literally is made for that. And yes the security issues chat keep getting fixed and workout to someone streaming a random item maybe. Much easier for them to download or watc on YouTube.
The biggest security issues are "out of scope" because making a secure open-to-the-web media hosting platform is hard, especially for free. The devs have just flat out said they're not doing it.
Everything that people do to get remote streaming working is either incredibly insecure, or a workaround that means most people can't stream from your library on the devices that they want to.