Selfhosted

Plex still costs the same to me. Lifetime pass means no price hike, and it "just works."

I've had so many instances of free to use, lifetime licenses, and purchased software that have turned into subscription services that I refuse to install anything that requires an account unless it can't be avoided. The fact that Plex required an account be created to view my own local content years before they started charging for use made it obvious subscription fees were coming.

Jellyfin works great. Combined with Wireguard it works great anywhere.

Several years ago I was looking to set up a media server and initially grabbed Plex because I'd heard so much good about it at the time. The moment it asked me to create an account with Plex during setup and I discovered this wasn't optional I immediately uninstalled it.

I remain baffled that anyone was okay with needing an externally managed account in order to use software running entirely on their own hardware, let alone the litany of additional enshittification that has happened since.

It's not really about cost for me. Accounts in control of someone else and increased fees to use my own hardware can take a long walk off a short pier.

I was a big supporter of PLEX for a lot of years but I don't want all the streaming options and ads and crap it was giving me. All I want is a solid media server application and Plex was no longer it.

JellyFin has been fantastic. I'll never go back

I've been self hosting for about 2 years now. I never gave Plex a thought. I immediately went with Jellyfin and setup tailscale for remote access and its been awesome. We have our phones and tvs with android boxes all connected. Only we use Wholphin on the android boxes bc its better but extremely happy with the Jellyfin/Tailscale setup.

I run both concurrently, but Plex has had a rash of outages recently that led to it and any services relying on it completely useless. It's insane that an online service outage would cause me to be unable to stream media locally, so yeah Jellyfin has been all but essential, recently.

I literally pay the same for Nebula, which is decidedly not my own media. Paying a subscription for your own media playback is so stupid.

Not that I want to defend Plex which is definitely enshittifying, but I don't think most people are buying Plex to stream their own media. They're doing it so other people can stream their media. Not wanting to buy a domain and set up port forwarding or a reverse proxy or whatever doesn't seem unreasonable to me. My grandparents are never going to use Tailscale, and even if they did, I don't think there are any Tailscale smart TV apps.

Disclosure: I run Plex and Jellyfin (and Navidrome) in parallel, and bought a lifetime pass years ago.

I have a pretty old lifetime Plex pass that I got on sale.

I'm still 100% a Jellyfin convert. Keeping my Plex server while trying out Jellyfin myself lasted even less time than my Windows partition after I had linux installed.

Tried Jellyfin, lacked critical functionality, got Plex, was amazed and got a lifetime pass and never worried about it again

I started selfhosting just because throwing cash on subscriptions at big corpos is not feasible since subs are increasing on a year-on-year basis. To my mind, if I’m going to self-host to yet again pay sub prices defeats the sole purpose of selfhosting.

That money you can pocket and invest in your own hardware for spare parts, upgrades & the like

My opinion: Plex has made it clear that they want your money. They don't want you to host your own media and be happy with that. They want you to pay a subscription.

The whole Plex Pass Lifetime subscription is kind of a trap. You might be getting away with paying once currently, but let's be honest: That means that they have taken your money once. And a some time in the future, a MBA dude will notice that they have a lot of non-paying heavy users (meaning: users who have paid several years ago, which is not relevant for the revenue goals of the current quarter) - and they will try to get you to pay again and again. You might be okay with that, but if you don't want to get hassled, you need to switch to something else.

I've been using Jellyfin for about 4 months as a home media server on an old laptop I installed Debian on and... I have nothing to add to the conversation, I just wanted to brag about that because it works really well and I was afraid I would fuck it up.

Anyway, Plex no good.

"But my parents can't use a VPN!!"

Was that line in the sand drawn before or after footing the bill, installing a media server, and an entire arr stack?

Their house is right there, bro.