If you haven't seen it yet, we recently made the announcement that starting July 1, 2026, the price of "Jellyfin Premium+ One Super Unlimited (with Ads)" will increase to $0.00 USD*. There has been a lot of enthusiasm regarding charge backs, and we're simply blown away by the community's response.
As we've had a high volume of inquiries, I'd ask if you could please wait until I'm off the support email shift to reach out about this issue. I've attached our schedule so you'll know when it is safe to reach out.
Thanks, and happy streaming!
*Example price in USD. Exact pricing in other currencies may vary.
I bought a plex pass about 5 years ago. I figured it would be a reasonable long term investment. I am starting to think I should have just gone with Jellyfin to start with.
I’m curious, was it a lifetime pass? If so, how does the price increase affect you?
Yeah, the reality is that the people who bought the Lifetime pass a few years ago have gotten their money’s worth several times over. Hell, in my first year alone, it saved me more money on streaming services than I spent on the lifetime pass. So I made my money back in less than a year.
It wouldn't really, but you should already see "the writing on the wall". Your own collections aren't prioritized, and who knows what they'll do next - putting ads into your own personal collections maybe?
The final straw was when sent that "you need to pay a monthly fee to do remote streaming" email. It was intentionally worded very unclear... and they just so happened to have a "bug" around that time where many users got an error message saying that they needed to buy it, which isn't true, because I had a lifetime pass on the server.
It didn't feel ethical for me to continue using Plex, when I needed to explain to some friends and relatives that they should absolutely not give any of their money to Plex.
A lot of people are too hung up on what could happen, rather than what is happening. I don't see anything other than my own media since Plex can remember that that's how I want to use it. In daily use I don't see any of their additional attempts to generate income. I can share with anyone easily and not expect them to mess with any VPN or other tricks to connect remotely, and neither do I have to set any of that up.
It's nice that there are good alternatives, but none of them are a complete replacement for Plex. Jellyfin users on lemmy are just in a very special bubble within a bubble.
Yep, it’s not a bug until they get called out.
Why? That investment is paying off as it’s now significantly higher priced and has more features behind it.
Jellyfin is not as good as Plex. The client is worse, the streaming options are worse, and the remote streaming and sharing is insecure and costs extra to do even remotely, pun intended, securely.
I find the clients ok, not great, but I haven't explored that space much, there are many more options than Plex. Plex seems to be making theirs worse. It actually seems like Plex tries to make my content in their client harder to find.
The real issue is jellyfin is not as good at finding metadata. I've overcome this with tinymediamanager, but it still isn't as good.
For secure remote streaming, I've got mine behind caddy with https (caddy does the let's encrypt dance it's really pleasant, even works with my free DNS provider), which seems about as secure as Plex was. Are there other security aspects I'm missing that Plex provides?
That's a fair point to bring up. You're right that it is an investment that has paid for itself in terms of a streaming service. Much better than hooking a laptop up to a TV and playing files directly, forgetting which episode you are on, or where you stopped watching a movie when you want to resume.
My thought with Jellyfin is that I don't generally watch outside my home network. I have sent invites to friends to watch my library, but none do. So most of the features I don't use at all. I could have saved myself the money, learned how Jellyfin works, and probably set it up exactly how I currently use Plex by now.