Being upset with Plex because of what they're doing with their prices is totally a legit gripe. Suggesting Plex is shitty is silly. It works great, it's simple for boneheads like me, and if you paid $70 or whatever a decade or so ago, it's been a phenomenal deal. I'm using it right now, I use it on a weekly basis at the very least, and it's super art it and forget. I have a media library on my PC, when I add to it I just right click the taskbar icon and "update libraries," and that's it. It requires next to no fiddling, it runs perfectly, it finds subtitles automatically, it does the whole metadata thing automatically. It's great, I have zero complaints.

But yeah, $700 or whatever is crazy talk. But $70 was awesome.

Paying for plex pass gets you hardware transcoding (GPU), and access to Plexamp if you use it for music. Also the ability to use it remotely outside your network I think (dunno, I don't use that feature) It's good stuff, but nowhere near worth what they're charging. I paid $80 for my lifetime Plex pass some years back.

Honestly, even without the $750 pricing, they've been consistently raising it for years now, presumably to encourage monthly subscriptions. I don't trust them, and it's falling into the category of "you'll own nothing and be happy." The other day I even read something about a user losing access to their Plex because Plex themselves didn't renew their certificate and they had to reach out to support to sort it out. That's... just completely fucked up. I hate that it requires an online account to access your local content. They did that years ago, and it's led to me wanting to use it less and less.

I have a Jellyfin server as backup, and have already moved away from Plexamp to use Lyrion and Navidrome instead for music.

The only reason I still use Plex at all is because I watch a lot of foreign content and Swiftfin hasn't yet updated to use Apple TV's accessibility settings for captions (Plex lets you override subtitles with the Apple TV caption settings for readability and consistency). Though I saw the Jellyfin team merged the change the other day, so I expect a fix for that to come with the next major update. If that works out, I'll be deleting Plex from my Proxmox server finally.