We've seen other companies pull this move by saying "lifetime" only applies to X version.

I like to think I got my money out of mine as well, even though I only used it for like a year or two before switching to jellyfin.

They dont want you to buy lifetime they want you to pay month to month.

For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex

As someone who picked up lifetime for like $45 or whatever it was (I think a 50% off sale?) what must have been 15 years ago...

I run jellyfin. Its just a better experience IMO.

A gentle reminder that Jellyin more or less requires you to set up a reverse proxy and a secure VPN to use it outside of your home.

Plex has been around quite a while longer than JF. Before JF, the only way to really have a "self-hosted Netflix" was with Plex, so there are a lot of us who built our long-standing media setups around that.

That said, I have a JF instance running and matched almost 1:1 with Plex specifically for this situation, so I'm going to start pivoting everyone to that as I wind Plex down.

As a lifetime owner, the number of features they've deprecated is probably the worst part.

• Photo support (luckily Immich came along)
• Tidal integration (no idea if that was Plex or Tidal's decision)
• Plugins (god forbid anyone add the functionality they keep removing)

It's close between that and the last app overhaul that removed a bunch of functionality.

I already have a lifetime Plex pass so this isn't an issue for me. 6 months from now when Plex decides my lifetime pass has a new expiry, then I'll be motivated.

I have the lifetime pass, bought it for like $80 many moons ago.

looks like we’ve arrived.

Agreed, this is the tipping point. This is where we will see Plex start to abandon the lifetime pass in favor of "imaginary money line go up forever" subscriptions.

Why not run both? That's what I do, then if Plex is an issue for someone I can make them a Jellyfin account

I haven't. I bought lifetime Plex Pass something like 15 years ago. A price change doesn't effect me. It's all their shitty updates and removing of features that makes me keep an eye on Jellyfin. I already have a sync setup for my watch status and a couple of my main users. Jellyfins apps are still worse.

Everything changed when they signed that A24 deal, and its not even the good movies, its the shitty also-rans. They want revenue now.

From a purely profit-oriented perspective, no. They're setting up a pretext to eliminate the lifetime license plan due to a lack of interest. No sane person would pay that kind of lump sum for the service (and the insane ones will bring in triple the revenue), so they'll claim that there is no market for it. After that, they're free to crank up the periodic subscription prices.

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.

Not really. Their plan for a while now is to convert all to subscriptions and this is just their latest salvo. Next up is getting rid of it completely due to "no demand" and then kicking existing lifetime accounts to some static version that won't be supported.

Yes.

Are you accessing your media from outside of your network?

I have heard that you need to set up a VPN for Jellyfin to securely use your media library remotely. Plex handles all of that for me so that I don't need to deal with it.

For me, the killer app for Plex is Plexamp, the music client. It's superb, and AFAIK Jellyfin doesn't really have an equivalent (there are 3P options, but they're lacking).

Realistically the only advantage of Plex is being able to watch it over the internet without a VPN. Which means it makes it easier to get friends and family access to your server or to access it yourself from random smart tvs outside your house.

If you only watch at home or have a fire stick that you take with you to watch abroad or your friends/family members have one and can setup a VPN on it it's not needed.

HDR, hardware transcoding, remote access.

Could they at least send the fun ones like Godzilla and aliens?

The fact that's needed at all is the problem. Developers need to stop making monolithic structures that have access to everything ever and putting it on the user to maintain to maintain a VPN network for security.

There's no reason I should not be able to just use an nginx reverse proxy for remote access to my jellyfin and have that be safe. It should at worst give people a copy of my media if there's a security issue.

Personally I went out of my way to make this be the case, i have my instance locked into an unprivileged lxc whitelist only on syscalls which took a while to figure out the minimum needed for function but I got there. The host System is using the hardened kernel from Upstream and a series of sysctl lockdowns for example P Trace is not allowed even if you are the root user.

So I do indeed just nginx reverse proxy my instant because the worst case scenario even if they got complete shell access to the system they would be locked into an unprivileged container that had no access to any files other than my media files but the fact that I have to go to this level is already ridiculous

With the original price as $250, a 100% increase would be adding the entire value to itself once (i.e doubling) taking us to $500.

A 200% increase is adding the $250 to the original two times for a total of $750.

So calling it a "200% increase" is correct.

It is true to say that "$750 is 300% of $250" or that "The price has tripled" - both correct, but the increase is only 200% because increase doesn't include the original as part of the value.

Ahh, memories. The start of my Linux journey nearly 20 years ago

enshitification isnt price hike all their "fonctionality" nobody were asking for are

About $3/mo. But for a lifetime deal you're also buying the risk. If they go bankrupt, stop honoring the lifetime deal, or any variation thereof tomorrow, you're out $750 - lifetime deals, where they exist are often heavily discounted compared to normal rates due to this. 20 years is though quite a long time. Plex is only 16 years old.

In a perfect world a company would limit the amount of lifetime deals available and only have them in the beginning to get some quick cash allowing them to scale. I don't think Plex is running a very good business, which also devalues the lifetime deal.

It;'s probably about 800 euro, but that is still 800 euro more than Emby/Kodi/Jellyfin or whatever other altnerative. I had a lot of issues with Plex due to them requiring that proof of ownership thing which didn't really work on TrueNas core I think it was?

Jellyfin is way easier imo