How do you all feel about the 120% increase in the annual plex pass pricing?
For me as I was reading the notification email my reaction went from, “oh they haven’t increased prices in 10 years and want to do so now, that’s fine”. Followed promptly by “wtf, they want to put the price from 50 bucks to 110 bucks, you have got to be kidding me”!!!
((local currencies used in description above))
Seriously though, I am happy to pay modestly for good services. Plex has been an incredible service while I have been using it, specifically for home media sharing (not streaming which I don’t use and don’t think there is anything of value on it), so I was happy to accept a price raise. And as I have said elsewhere, I am happy to pay for another year of Plex as I pay annually. On top of which, because where I am in life right now, I don’t have the time to reconfigure my home media server etc. Right now, it is more convenient to pay a little extra to not have to worry about that on top of everything else.
That said, I won’t tolerate a price raise above this one under any circumstances. Not for Plex!
Setting aside the concept that I do want to support the development of Plex, a single 120% increase smacks of greed and little more! Nah, if Plex Pass wasn’t supporting the company financially, the price of Plex Pass would have been raised years ago. So this is a move that will drive customers away rather than encourage repeat business, and unlike with my landlord, I can say to plex f##k You, I need a roof over my head, I don’t need you!
And in these tough times if it’s a choice between a roof over my head, or a less than ideal home media server, can you guess which I am going to pick? Obviously the roof.
So yes, I am happy to fork out for a modest price increase! 120% is not that, however. If I had to put a number on it, I would say somewhere between a 25% to 50% price increase would be more preferred.
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Doubling after 10 years isn’t that bad. It seems bad as it’s one hit, but it’s less than inflation. We’ve been lucky with the price up until now.
What’s interesting to me is what they do with the increase - if it’s all online streaming and social then I’m out (irrespective of price) as I want a local-content-centric system which Plex used to be.
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I’m not too upset about the increase. It’s still significantly lower than alternatives. However, I would like to see some improvements to go along with this increase. I want to be able to be able to select the default library when I open the app. I want to see my DVR library, not Home. I want to always go to Library, not recommended.
I feel like I should be able to make these customizations with it running on my local computer.
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Good point JCHH. Note that $50 plus 10 years of compounding inflation at 3% (what governments target) is $67 (compared to $110)
You’re right, the official numbers show 34.6% for the US over the last 10 years so my comment was exaggerated - sorry for my assumption there.
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Inflation is a summary statistic reflecting the aggregate tendency of prices to move across a wide basket of products. Individual products can go up, down, or stay the same over a period of time. For example, an entry level computer cost $2,500-3,000 in 1990, and something millions of times more powerful costs $100 today. If someone sold an entry level computer for $8,000 today, we would not say “oh, well, that’s inflation”, we would say “this person is crazy”.
Plex Pass has zero material input costs – it can be sold for $1 or $1,000 and it’d be profitable either way – but to support the company it needs to cover labour costs. As I understand it, Plex is a remote-first company. We have very little insight into the number of employees, who’s in what role, where they’re located, or what the cost profile is. Moreover, because Plex took venture capital funding, the market incentives are further distorted by whether or not their funders want to extract profits or continue investing to grow. It is simply not possible to externally evaluate the increase in costs reasonable to pass onto the users.
One thing we can evaluate is that the choice to sell Plex Pass as a lifetime subscription, early on, was designed to accelerate revenue at the cost of cutting off long term revenue. Right, this is a “niche” product as everyone associated with Plex reminds us. The real business potential here is not Plex Pass, it’s senior citizens dying fused to the chair while watching reruns of Gunsmoke on free ad-supported Plex. People who get Plex Pass are a tiny portion of the business. So if we take these repeated and patronizing reminders as being true, what we can take away from that is that the audience is limited. Obviously the number of subscribers and lifetime purchasers will grow over time, but they’re probably approaching a degree of saturation. So that’s a problem – there are a finite number of people who would be willing to pay $x per year over, say, 10 years, but instead they pay less than 10*$x upfront and never pay again. That’s great when your company is trying to grow fast and you need a ton of capital now, but it’s bad when your company gets a little bigger and you have ongoing fixed costs and now less ongoing revenue.
Anyway my broader point here is actually the opposite of what I’m saying – customers and prospective customers don’t need to spend a lot of time and effort figuring out what the price “should” be in an attempt to rationalize a price increase. If the price is too high for you, don’t buy it. And if the company’s decisions backed them into a corner, that’s their fault, not yours.
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I may just sign up for a lifetime pass before this new pricing kicks in. Lifetime pass at current price is only 45% more than a single annual pass using the new rate. I wonder if that was their intent all along, jack up prices, force people in to a lifetime pass, raise some capital quickly for the company (sacrificing longer term)
I wonder if that was their intent all along, jack up prices, force people in to a lifetime pass, raise some capital quickly for the company (sacrificing longer term)
Well that would be a monumentally stupid plan! What I am more inclined to wonder is if they intend on discontinuing the lifetime pass, and/or find ways to force prior lifetime pass members back onto standard annual or monthly subscriptions. Perhaps by not providing future feature updates to the lifetime pass “version” thereby incentivising a return to paying memberships.
When price gouging unexpectantly without demonstrated reasons is on the menu, I am not trusting their “next” move to be honorable.
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I beg to differ @SeekingAdvice I think your highlighting why no price increase or something a great deal more reasonable should be had.
You posit that Plex is making most of their income from advertisements on their streaming content, and you’re probably right, but I would add that if that wasn’t proving financially viable in these past years, shouldn’t we have seen price increases before now? It doesn’t make sense to me that “all of a sudden” the books aren’t balancing, leading to this extreme “fix”. Which makes me think that this is being done for the sole intent to make EVEN MORE money.
But you’re ultimately right, to some degree this conversation is pointless. It is up to us to decide if the new price is too much. Of course, this conversation has a secondary purpose, to make our displeasure known. And if they take note of our disinterest in continuing to use plex under these circumstances, just maybe plex can shift course!
AKA, still increase their price and make a little bit more money, but without the greed!
Honestly, would Plex work like it did so far, the price would be still reasonable.
However lately they’re just chasing money and ignoring users (also removing features from the main app, like photos and music), so even the old price wouldn’t be good enough.
What I have seen before is that an organisation makes a last push to increase income before selling up, they show an income of all these lifetime passes in a year and then say the new price is $250 so forecast better income.
Even if this is not the case, the model of reducing features and moving those features to lifetime is a dead end, will lead to a loss of loyalty and make things worse.
It seems that current development is poor and users would rather roll back, now it comes down to whether the management understand and accept the sunken cost aspects of the software they have developed.
Were users desperate for anything in the new version, could it be rolled back to a “lite” version?
As for inflation, savvy Landlords in the UK included a rent increase term of RPI as published by the UK Gov. Such terms mean the rent increases every year, HOWEVER, if a Landlord tried to increase the rent in one year to account for the last 10 years the first tier tribunal property chamber who Tenants can refer any increase to will almost certainly throw out such an increase, even if it is in line with local rents.
So in my opinion Plex is likely to lose customers because nobody likes to be ripped off.
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