Petition?/ Discussion for long standing yearly/monthly Plex Pass members

[ritalin]

Before anyone else says something about it, the “?/Discussion” was supposed to imply I am not calling for a legitimate petition.

I have been a Plex user since the service left its Apple only server status.
I have been a Plex Pass member almost since day 1. (I purchased it 1 month after launch)
I purposefully chose to go with the yearly payment because I wanted to financially support a product that I really enjoyed and figured I would end up contributing more in the long run than if I did a one and done payment to Plex.

This turned out to be true, as I have contributed 3x the lifetime pass over the 12 years I have been a member, $389.87 to be exact.

To be ultra clear, I would have continued paying the $30 a month fee indefinitely and I would have been happy to do it.
I love Plex, I think the service they offer is amazing, and over the years there have only been a few hiccups that I can think of, which were all remedied quite quickly. Yes I know there are open source alternatives, hell I was streaming to family members through XMBC via an FTP server when XBMC was still Xbox only. The good old security through obscurity days.
But you get what you pay for, and I was happily paying for Plex because it quite literally solved every single issue I had with managing with my setup.

When I read that the yearly cost was raising to $70, it was a bit shocking.
A 133% increase in price is not something you see every day.
When I saw that there was nothing huge on day one, let alone on the horizon, to justify this increase it was a little more shocking.
When found out that there was no discounted path, or even a thought given, to long standing members I wasn’t shocked, I was a bit angry.
When I reached out to support to see if there was anything they could offer to a day 1, yearly subscriber, and was met with an answer of “you can look at our yearly or monthly options if you want to pay less”, I was more than a little angry.

So here I am posting on this forum. Likely yelling into the void.

After reading some of the comments in other threads, I keep seeing the idea of too many free loaders utilizing Plex and they need to do something about that.
I hope this is not the case, as penalizing your long standing paying members is a crap way to go about fixing that problem.

If anyone from the Plex staff reads this, I want you to understand that I can pay $120 for a Lifetime Pass, hell the $70 a year is no real issue either. This has NOTHING to do with the money.

It has everything to do with the idea that you as a company never bothered to consider that long standing, paying members, have put more into your coffers over the years than all of the Lifetime Members which you gave a pass to with this change. Yes I very much understand the point of the term “Lifetime Pass”. This post is not meant as a dig towards lifetime pass holders. The post is meant as a dig towards you and your ideas about what loyalty means.
The fact that you think telling me “hey go buy that $120 lifetime pass now” is a favor after I have willingly given you that much 3 times over is F*@{ed up and seems to show a short sightedness I never though this companies management had.

• A disappointed fan

[MasterCorn]

You should just buy the Plex Pass life time. I was once like you on my own server but then I bit the bullet, right now you can still get it for 119 for lifetime you can lock in the benefits for a one time fee, development of the app is highly unlikely to be cheap on the developers. As an ex-developer in website modules that worked with databases it was very exhausting and time consuming, I agree totally with your concern on the price increases but they don’t take effect until April, to hire developers to continue developing new features and keeping the platform up to date and functioning smoothly costs a lot of money and resources, your monthly contributions likely weren’t enough for one person with the increases in the cost of living, but i don’t believe there needs to be a petition

[Alteren8371]

Not with plex just another user. Well I completely understand the frustration, I don’t think this warrants any kind of petition. The monetary cost they’ve put in place isn’t really a surprise to me I got plex pass long ago because I figured there might be future value in it amongst the current features and I wanted to support them without dealing with subscriptions which I despise. My hope is they will provide us with features we want as self hosting is why we use this software as system admins. Currently the free shows and movies with ads might help, but it puts us in the back seat, so maybe if people pay to use the software for use outside of their LAN we’ll get development we want rather then what they need to maintain the company along with their staff.

Least that’s the optimistic view I chose otherwise you dive into conspiracy theories about what their motivations are long term.

I bought plex pass lifetime so it umbrellas my users and none of this affects them provided they are using my server. Unsolicited financial changes are hard for people to stomach I get that. The alternative platforms really aren’t that much better; maybe not needing financial support but certainly they offload costs onto the system admins and technical support is if they have time to help or if you have the skills to fix it yourself. I’m not convinced that’s better per se.

[ritalin]

I understand that and I most likely will purchase the $120 lifetime, but thats not the point of the post. Truly I was curious if anyone else out there choose the $30 a year option for the same reasons I did. The “?/Discussion…” was meant to point out that I was not really considering this a petition.

Having a little background in the Android app world and having had conversations with successful devs like the Kevin Berry (Nova Launcher) about their problems with the one and done payment method for premium versions of apps, I’ve since approached lifetime subscriptions with a different mentality. At least for developers/software I give a crap about.

Out of frustration I was trying to point out that crapping on the type of subscriber you want is a bad way to go about things.
If I had paid the $120 for life time right out the gate, I would have been a free loader after year 4. The company no longer gets any financial investment from me at all.
Pushing me to do so now, will just offset that timeframe, and I will now become a non contributing user within the next 4 years.

I do understand that Plex thinks its real profits are in data capture, but that again feels at odds with this move.

Overall this was just disappointing and it feels short sighted, so I am airing a grievance.
Again I have no issue with paying the Lifetime and ending my support of the company in 4 years, and I can afford to pay the $70 per year if I wanted to continue supporting the company. Its more that the lack of consideration makes me no longer want to support them, which is disappointing. Death of a fanboy I guess you could call it.

[ritalin]

I get all of this.
Again, I am a Plex Pass member and I have been since just about day 1 in 2012.
As I stated to MasterCorn above, I just look at this a bid differently than most I guess.
For software, projects or devs I actually give a ■■■■ about, I think lifetime passes are bad thing. It front loads the company with a burst of cash, but after some time (4 years in this case) those lifetime users just become freeloaders that are no longer contributing to your companies bottom line.

While I also HATE subscription services, I do not look at projects like Plex in the same vein as something like Adobe Creative Cloud. Plex is still (/was) the little company trying to do something cool, that I support, and I was happily supporting them yearly with money because of that.

I guess that’s really a good way to encapsulate this feeling. Its feels like Plex just tried to pulled an Adobe, while still being a scrappy little upstart. The little upstarts are supposed to give a ■■■■ about their userbase, especially the ones that are financially contributing. I fully expect Adobe to not give a flying f#@k about me.
I would not have thought the same here though.

As stated, I will likely purchase the lifetime, and become another no contributing user in 4 years time. Well actually, I guess that would now be in about 1.75 years time.

[mr_mustard]

Full disclosure: I have a lifetime pass so it doesn’t affect me. That being said, nobody likes to see prices go up and it is a big percentage leap. But $70/year is like six bucks per month. It’s not gonna break anyone’s bank and I really wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it. Considering you have the option of a lifetime pass for less than the cost of a two-year sub, I’m just not seeing what the big deal is. You wanted a discounted path? That’s it right there.

[ritalin]

Its not that I wanted a discount path to a Lifetime so much as I wish they would have offered a path to keep paying at the same yearly rate if the user had been paying at that rate for at least over the cost of a single lifetime pass.

As stated, I purposefully chose to pay per year instead of the lifetime pass because I wanted to continue supporting Plex financially. Again, as stated, I can afforded $70 per year, and I can afford $129, that’s just not really the point.

Im not trying to ■■■■ on the people that got a lifetime pass on day one, but technically speaking they stopped contributing at the original yearly rate on year 4. I will be moving to the lifetime, and at the new yearly rate, that equals me not contributing in less than two years.

I really posted this up to see how many people in the community choose to pay yearly like I did, for the same reason. Maybe I’m alone in that, and if so them it makes sense. I just kind of doubted that I was. Also the flippant nature of billing support when I reached out was a bit off putting. Though I have worked call-centers and support positions in the past, and I am sure they are getting hammered.