It’s going to be very interesting in how they choose to handle the purchase stuff. If I were them, I’d give another 30 days from the date of the email – effectively moving the price increase to the end of May – and refunding the delta for any folks that purchased at the raised rate. The email coming out a day after the change happened is a bad look. As someone who’s spent 23 years in IT Operations, I’ve seen this happen many times and all the times it wasn’t planned. It was a miss on some level and there was a scramble to address the issues.
I’m hoping that’s the case here. Giving Plex the benefit of the doubt a bit, but only if they step up and address things the right way. The radio silence on these issues here in the forums seems to indicate, unfortunately, that they won’t.
This policy absolutely disgusts me, and the fact you jacked your prices up on the lifetime pass because you wanted to trap everyone in monthly forever is disheartening. I considered buying the plex pass at the previous price, even though I am to damn poor for that but at $350 cad? You guys suck, this policy sucks, you’re killing your app.
You had ample opportunity to buy it at the previous price, it was also announced in advance and gave everyone a chance to buy it at the old price. You didn’t, so don’t say you would.
There is a lot of criticism you can lobby at plex, but pricing is not one of those. It is extremely cheap. If it is not worth half a coffee for you, you don’t really need it.
I am not taking sides here, but I’ve seen many, many posts about emails not being sent or sent on the last day of the “lower” price.
Not everybody is following the forum closely (or at all). And this is not their fault. They’re just using a product for free that did not show them that it’s time to buy a Plex pass or loose functionality.
So please don’t speak to them as if they’ve done something wrong.
How long was the plex pass available for the lower price? A decade?
Watch Pass is what? 1.99€? and people call it ‘absolutely disgusting’, ‘trap’, ‘you guys suck’
Instead of saying thank you for the decade of free service.
Please.
Very unappropriate statement.
A vendor offers a free product with a free feature for price xyz. User uses it and does not get informed that (a) there is a price raise and does not get informed that (b) an important feature will go behind a paywall.
Unhappy about this information policy and disappointed about a free feature disappearing as such… is a normal human reaction.
Maybe those user said thank you a thousand times as it was a free feature already?
I have Plex for my personal media library and I was using the remote streaming feature, I also paid twice the one-shot payment to unblock two android devices.
Unfortunately for my case the plex pass is overpriced just to maintain a reverse-proxy feature.
I’ll spend the weekend installing Jellyfin, goodbye plex it has been very nice up until now.
I went to Jellyfin and never looked back. Took me all of 30 minutes to get it dialed in the way I wanted on the same hardware as Plex, pointed at the same libraries.
So streaming will be a Plex Pass feature, which is what the original post said.
My suggestion to everyone else here is looking into a VPN so your phone can simply tunnel to your server bypassing remote play entirely making it a moot feature.
If you already have the bandwidth for remote streaming then the VPN should be no problem.
Well it was a free feature that was removed with no explanation- randomly for no reason. So most of the people bothered by this never wanted Plex Pass.
I think Plex should not cripple its own software intentionally to make profit, self defeating.
That’s fair, I am a freeloader, I was just under the mistaken impression that Plex was free and only certain vanity features costs money.
That’s not the case anymore, now critical features that were free have been locked behind a paywall without explanation or reasoning.
For me, I think I am going to switch to Jellyfin for anything other than streaming to my PS5 and PS4 (since Plex has a monopoly on those platforms) because I do get the feeling Plex does not want anyone using the software for free and that’s their right- but if that’s the case I gotta be moving on because I can’t be spending money every month on some software that really doesn’t do anything unique from existing free software.
Plex is a for profit company, they charge money for the goods and services they provide They are not crippling their software, remote streaming works fine. If you do not pay for plex pass, you are not a customer, you got a free lunch for some time, great, but you are not entitled to free stuff forever.
It is still the case, it is free end certain features cost money. You can still stream locally, or remotely with a vpn for free.
What do you mean without reasoning? Plex is a for profit company they need money to survive and pay their employees? Employees need to eat, just like you.
On the one hand you say no other streaming platform provides clients for the Sony ecosystem and on the other hand you say plex does not provide anything unique. Those 2 statements are mutually exclusive.
Look at it this way:
If streaming remotely is not worth half a coffeee a month to you, how valuable is it to you really? What would be an acceptable price to you?
I agree - since I am using Plex with my own certs, domains, etc, in a docker container with nginx, it took about ~ 5 minutes to register another domain and host Jellyfin against the same media in docker.
All in all, both software/experience are nearly equivalent. Plex is more polished wrt scraping metadata which means Jellyfin requires more work with identifying content and/or manually adding covers, posters, etc. In terms of both the web UI and mobile UI, from a cursory perspective, they seemed essentially the same to me.
However, there are some things that Jellyfin does better than (free tier) Plex. These include: sharing playlists, no reliance on external auth services, it remembers my last subtitle/audio selections between episodes of shows, doesn’t require a secondary service for scrobbling (like Tautuli), etc etc. Jellyfin works ootb w/ multi-scrobber and my preferred music app (Symphonium).
Because of the low effort in setting either Plex or Jellyfin up, and are already running mostly independently, just run both. Docker containers are cheap.
Plex is not free at all anymore to me if they are deprecating it’s free functionality that I was already using for years and never cost money. Streaming remotely is a basic feature of a server connected to the Internet and not a premium feature. If it already streams locally it can stream on the internet too.
No I will not buy Plex pass to stream to my server which I own and run. Plex is quite frankly, greedy asking me to pay them for an App on my phone I don’t want (I use the free web player) and remote streaming that is not a feature unique from local streaming.
I will run a VPN on the server and connect to that and bypass Plex pass entirely because it’s my server, my electricity, and my Internet connection and they can’t control how I route my home network even if they’d like to.
I will in fact be getting a free lunch so whatever. I just think trying to disable the server in my house from connecting to my phone using the Internet I pay for is a little silly sorry.
give me $300. i like how half this country cant even afford food or healthcare and this company is like “lets charge $300 for a free feature. gosh gee whiz why is everyone leaving? maybe we should tell them we’re also selling their data now to data brokers too”
