gg Plex marketing team. Way to antagonize your paying customers.
Half Price Lifetime Membership for Loyal Free users but not for Loyal Monthly or Annual subscribers?
Yeah, who ever it was that thought up this email campaign didn’t think it through very well. If you are going to offer any kind of incentives like this, it needs to be globally and not cherry picked. Don’t antagonize the people that have been paying monthly or yearly by not offering them the same deal. They may very well not continue paying for the Pass at their current level. In fact, if they stop and then get an email offer, they may just say “No Thanks” because they are upset from being excluded on the offer initially.
I’ve sent in a request for this reduced rate to their customer service email. Got a response back saying they send them out at random and to keep checking my email.
I waited a couple weeks and then decided to just pony up the $150.
If its true that the offer is sent out to set number of users that are randomly chosen, it would probably make sense that more people who are free users would get them. I don’t know the way the user numbers truly lay out for PLEX, but I bet there are a LOT more free users than Plex Pass users. That said, its kind of ingenious to use a random model. Companies offering this sort of deal to already subscribing users are basically turning away money. It might feel nice to give a sweet deal to a loyal customer, but, financially speaking, it makes much more sense to get the deal in the hands of people not already paying you. You see this most commonly in cable/Satellite deals, or the big cell phone companies. New customers = new money. By issuing the offers randomly, Plex is statistically more likely to hit the free users, but still include a chance for their loyal customers to receive the offer as well. And at the end of the day they can throw their hands up in the air and say “it’s random.”
I appreciate the service and the software that plex offers. That being said, I want them to succeed financially and to continue offering me these services (and to develop new services, like plex cloud), so this doesn’t offend me or anything like that. To be honest, I feel that being a plex pass member doesn’t add a ton of features (or at least not a lot that appeal to me) and I’ve been surprised that the key functionality of the program, being able to host a streaming server with your own media and from your own computer, is 100% free!! Most of the additional things you get (early updates, free phone apps, plex sync, DVR service) are just the dressing on an already amazing product and not vital to most people’s use. With that in mind, IF plex can get convince some free users to sign up with a cheap life time deal, good for them. If a few loyal monthly subscribers get a deal along the way too, feel grateful. Plex doesn’t owe us anything but the service that we pay for. Luckily, they treat us pretty well as loyal customers anyway (another testament to their quality). If you enjoy the service, give them a little leeway. They have to have a successful business model to keep going, and successful business needs to balance bringing new money in while keeping current customers happy without losing current income.
[For reference: When I first discovered Plex I signed on as a monthly subscriber for quite a while, and then reverted to free user for a number of months. A few months back I finally did the $150 life time purchase.]
Fully agree with it not being the best financial model and that using random is quite a good excuse. However, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult for them to offer the lifetime membership after say 2 years of paying, then they have had their cake and eaten it really because all of us will have already paid for more than a lifetime’s membership before we take the half price deal.
Part of what I like about Plex is they aren’t like cable companies, the way them guys treat loyal customers was clearly portrayed in South Park.
