Weirdest ad for Jellyfin I’ve ever seen
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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It's so weird though. Do they not know it exists? Do they expect their customers not to know it exists?
When your primary competition is free (and arguably better), the last thing one should think to do is raise prices.
I can only assume that some C-suites are looking at numbers and don't know what else to do but make the product more expensive.
Jellyfin isn’t arguably better, especially for some of tne main things people use Plex for - remote streaming and library sharing. Jellyfin pretty much doesn’t support them.
That's the arguably part. The argument.
The company isn’t in its death throes - the lifetime pass is.
They want everyone on subscriptions, so they’re just pricing the lifetime pass ridiculously high to discourage its purchase. If anyone does buy it they make big bucks, but if they don’t they make subscription money.
This is the type of move you pull when you know you’ve got the market cornered.
Yeah, like we (the one good accounting office I worked at) would buy licenses (not rent) for Microsoft office. Instead of paying 40 a user a month or whatever, we paid 400 a user once. It bugged the hell out of our inhouse IT "specialist" (the partner who liked to play with computers) but he could pay 500 a year per employee for his own software.
It looked cost prohibitive, but it was just a lump sum instead of an annuity. It was still only $100 software tho.
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 also have lifetime plexpass but plex has pissed me off too much with recent changes that make the experience worse. the enshittification is inevitable, so i just cut my losses and am riding the upswing of Jellyfin. It's objectively not as good yet but i have found some temporary workarounds for the biggest omissions.
Its way too hard to make plex work without internet
I need to do the same thing, but how did you do it alongside Plex? Meaning, can it just point to the same library and neither Plex nor Jellyfin gets confused (because of one generating files or paths that messes up the other installation)?
Yeah exactly as you said. They point to the same media folder and both run at the same time. Seems to work fine for me fine.
I basically use Jellyfin when I'm at home right now and for anything remote I still use Plex.
I honestly think Jellyfin is nicer. It's faster and it isn't always shoving other libraries in my face. It just has my content the way I want and that's it.
@NekoKoneko Neither should get confused. If you’re using Docker there is a sync for watched positions. I think it’s called jellfyfin watched or the like. Not at home to check.
I have Plex lifetime but yes it smells bad. Also frequently have issues. Common lip sync. For a while back not playing 4K. You can’t charge so much and not have a perfect product.
I have Plex Lifetime too, but at some point it just feels gross and I'd love to have an open source stack. I'd like to have Jellyfin running in parallel if it's possible so I can switch over at a moment's notice.
But yeah, that's good to know.
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.
So instead of retiring it, we’re keeping it available at a price that reflects the real, ongoing value of the software we’re committed to building and maintaining for years to come.
I left Plex because of exactly this. What exactly have they delivered lately to actual users that isn't BS cloud streaming stuff?
Well, they redesigned their mobile app so that it only works half as well as it used to. That’s quite the accomplishment!
Oh god I remember that. No one asked them to and they burned a ton of money to do it, shipped buggy, and arguably the design was worse.
@scrubbles @plex and all of this time since, they’ve still not put out the updated version of the Apple TV version which has been problematic for so many years with audio/video sync issues, etc.
Psh, even I could do that!
Heads to Claude Code....
Don't get me started on the new Roku app...
Bought a Plex Pass when it was $100. Pretty decent at the time, much easier to get the family hooked up to that vs Jellyfin.
And every change they've made - especially adding their own completely trash streaming library - has taken value away from that pass.
Agree, I still have my $100 pass too, but it just got to the point where I couldn't justify it anymore. I got almost ten years out of that pass, I consider that good. 10 dollars a year to support their development. Then their development stopped being for server owners like me, and I knew it was sadly time to move on.
The problem is the "lifetime" option, they needed to just stop offering it.
The optics of making it prohibitively expensive instead is just terrible.
It used to "pay for itself" after 3.5 years, now it takes over a decade. I don't think they understand most people were buying it before (as in a decade ago) as a form of donation to a software that didn't have a good alternative.
Now that Plex is trying to become a media streamer themselves for a revenue stream, and alternatives like jellyfin exist for what made Plex popular....
They should have just sunset the "lifetime" deal
It used to “pay for itself” after 3.5 years, now it takes over a decade.
The cynic in me says that this also means subscription pass costs will be going up in the future too. So it may again "pay for itself" after 3.5 years with a $750 price tag for lifetime
if they thought the $750 price point would make them more money than $250, they would just raise the price. instead they're exploiting fomo and essentially admitting that the market has dried up but they want to continue to dangle bait for whales.
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They almost certainly don’t expect people to buy it at this price. They’re putting it out to pasture.
Give it a year or two and they’ll do an announcement that no one is purchasing lifetime licenses so they’re sunsetting the scheme altogether.
they just want people on the monthly/yearly subscriptions.
They gotta pay their corporate trips to Hondorus somehow https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/inside-a-corporate-retreat-that-went-very-badly-wrong/ar-AA20gPzT
Y'know, at least they invited everyone instead of just being a C-suite retreat. I guess
Such a fun read!
What's the point? Better off paying for Netflix at that rate for a few years
I bought my lifetime pass years ago. But, there is no way that plex is worth more than an entire computer
LOL, fuck off. I dropped plex for jellyfin as soon as they hid encoding behind a paywall and every time I see anything related I'm so glad I left them behind.
Oh yea? What if Plex releases an awesome feature and it takes jellyfin devs a month to add? What then huh?
/s
Oh well in that case I guess I'll have to abandon my principles and throw away 750 dollars of course!
/s
Hey, why do you have 2 accounts?
/s
There are almost no digital products that are worth a three digit price tag and this is certainly not one of those.
Hmm, I'm of two minds about this
On the one hand it's simply a ridiculous increase and pretty indefensible as a jump. Especially given that it doesn't really offer much you can't do for free with something like jellyfin
On the other hand at least they still offer a lifetime sub, crazy expensive yes, but the option is still technically there for someone who wants to use the software without subscription. Plenty of companies have gone down the sub only road, and I think we should give at least a bit of credit for them not doing the same, even though they'd clearly like to
I know audiophiles are a bit of an outlier in general, but Roon lifetime is even more IIRC!
I don't get what the point of this is. I have never paid a cent for Plex. If I ever want to access my library remotely, I'll use something else.
What will you use? Because pretty much nothing else exists that is as easy and as widely supported as Plex.
It will probably be Jellyfin. I've dabbled with it in the past, but it's likely the best option once I finish transitioning to Linux anyway. I've been working on a home server to handle all media related activities instead of using my desktop 24/7, so this is something I'll incorporate into that project.
Well jellyfin is not made for remote access, which was my point.
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As long as they honor the lifetime part I'm not bothered. I bought my over a decade ago for about $25-30 on sale.
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