Until recently, managed home users and unmanaged home users were treated fairly equally in available features.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/features/plex-home/
The example home article gives good explaination of why/when to use managed vs un-managed home users.
When plexamp/plexdash were released, they arrived with the limitation that anyone with their own plex account must have plex pass, including un-managed home users.
Managed home users (which obviously require plex pass for the admin account), are able to use plexamp/dash by virtue of being sub profiles of the admin user.
Un-managed home users, which have their own dedicated plex account, were left out in the plexamp/dash cold, without a dedicated plex pass for themselves, no soup for you.
Now another new feature is being tied to plex pass at the client, skip ahead.
Managed home users continue to get a free ride and all is well for them.
Un-managed home users, continue to get the shaft. Since skip ahead requires plex pass at the client, this means un-managed home users get no skip ahead, even though the home admin obviously has plex pass (HOME is a plex pass feature).
Now 2 more features are on the loose, ‘watch together’ and ‘shared items’.
Watch together is stated to be free for all while in the experimental beta phase, but it seems apparent that it will eventually be rolled into a plex pass feature, and how likely that it will also be plex pass client based, potentially screwing un-managed home users once again, remains to be seen.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/features/watch-together/
Shared items, doesn’t have any language to indicate whether or not it is or will be plex pass, but it also remains to be seen whether this will eventually become a plex pass only feature.
Now I fully understand Plex is a business and needs ongoing income to survive and thrive and continue to develop these awesome new features/apps/functionality.
However, the current path for un-managed home users simply does not scale.
For family of 4, given a plex pass server with HOME functionality in use, this provided some pretty great benefits of unlocking the mobile apps for both managed and un-managed users.
Even users not in a plex home, could unlock the mobile apps for a one time fee without committing to plex pass ongoing subscription or large upfront lifetime cost.
Lets look at the cost scaling factor;
Given a family of 4, with a single plex pass admin, and 3 un-managed home users, this makes costs go from $5/monthly, to $20/monthly, an increase of $180 per year, in order to receive access to skip-ahead, and plexamp.
If paying yearly, costs go from $40/year, to $120/year.
Or for the big investor, $360 for 3x lifetimes.
Larger home family costs are left as an excerise to the reader.
My ‘feature request’ is to bring un-managed home users back under the same set of features that managed home users receive.
That means that un-managed users should receive access to at least skip ahead and any other similar future features which, which may well be extra ‘client’ features, but still fall under the umbrella of plex home.
I also believe that plexamp should be made available to un-managed home users as well, but I also can see and understand the point that is an extra, and optional client, that is not required for regular access of content.
Plex dash, since it needs a server anyway, there doesn’t seem much of an issue to continue to require a plex pass server/account.
I do not really see any use case for non-server-admins to need plex dash anyway.
If you read all this far, thank you.
TLDR;
Un-managed home users are being unfairly targeted and prevented from using new functionality which clearly should equally apply to plex home of both types: managed/un-managed users.
If this means that plex must increase prices on plex pass (6/month, etc), or consider splitting plex pass into separate client (example .99/month) and server (existing prices) licenses, then perhaps it is time to do so.
Perhaps a client plex pass could also provide a reduction (or even elimination where possible) of ads in the free ad-supported content, to make it more palatable for those without servers.
In any case, both kinds of home users should be treated equally across the board and have the same available feature set.
