Plex’s price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

The very concept of being charged a subscription fee to access your own media rubs me the wrong way. It’s an anathema to the whole self-hosted ethos and a bid to escape the spiraling costs of music and video subscription services. If Netflix isn’t getting my money for original programming, I’m certainly not handing Plex cash to rewatch my old Spaced DVDs.

Let me be clear: I’m all for paying for a service that offers fair value. If Plex were storing and serving your data — like Google One or a hosted VPS — that would be one thing. I’m also more than willing to accept that Plex Pass represents solid value for the features it has accumulated over the years. But what does Plex’s Remote Watch Pass actually do? It simply allows you to view content on any number of servers you have access to, no matter where you are.

In that sense, it’s little more than a glorified relay gateway — albeit one that’s now required even if you set up port forwarding. Granted, it handles authentication and basic routing, but everything else depends on your server, such as available bandwidth and transcoding capabilities. Paying $29.99 a year or $2.99 per month for that feels steep, especially when you’re hosting the media yourself.

There’s one good caveat here: you don’t need a Remote Watch Pass if the server owner has a Plex Pass. This also gives the owner extra features like transcoding, downloads, and Plex Dash, which they’ll no doubt find very useful if they’re serving data to a larger number of viewers. However, priced at $69.99 for the whole year or $249.99 for a lifetime, this again doesn’t represent very good value for money for those self-hosters simply looking to take their own media outside their home.

The Plex Pass convenience might be worth it for individuals who are sharing their media collection far and wide. However, I’d highly encourage casual users looking to dial into their own media library to explore at least two viable free methods that don’t require paying a penny to Plex. I use Tailscale to securely access my NAS outside my home, and it’s perfectly suited to serving up your media on the go, too.

But if you’re jumping through the hoops to get around Plex’s remote paywall, you might be better off asking yourself if it’s even worth sticking with Plex at all. If you’re not wed to the UI and/or growing increasingly displeased with the nickel-and-diming of seemingly simple yet core features like external streaming, it could be time to drop Plex for the open-source Jellyfin.

I’ll happily advocate for Jellyfin all day, but I know that the Plex faithful aren’t going to want to convert without good cause. Jellyfin is now in its seventh year of open-source development and has just released a major update featuring a faster database, HEVC support for Firefox, advanced dashboard metrics, and much more. I’ve used it for five years and had no issues, but it’s only become better in that time.

Jellyfin has native clients for all the major playback platforms covered: Android, iOS, laptops and PCs, Roku, Xbox, and, more recently, the long-awaited support for Samsung Tizen TVs. Performance is great too. I have over 500 movies, 8,500 episodes, and nearly 10,000 tracks in my library, all of which stream flawlessly. Hardware transcoding is free — a major advantage over Plex — and includes support for HEVC, AV1, Dolby Vision tone-mapping, and more.

While Jellyfin may not have every extra feature Plex has accumulated over the years, it remains a fully fledged media library suite in its own right, free from the feature creep and noise that increasingly clutter Plex’s original mission. It’s not the barebones alternative; it has everything you’ll need and likely much more. See my previous Plex vs Jellyfin comparison for a more in-depth feature breakdown. The only thing you have to set up is secure internet access, but Plex users are now facing the same issue unless they stump up cash.

Unfortunately, there’s no one-click migration button to leave Plex, but if you’re not bothered about watch history and the like, it’s as simple as pointing Jellyfin to your existing media folder structure. If you do want to bring more of your Plex data with you, Traky sync is a good starting point. Advanced tools like JellyPlex-Watched, migrate-plex-to-jellyfin, and Plexyfin offer even deeper migration strategies if you’re comfortable with scripts.

In any case, your best bet for migrating is to run the two side-by-side for a while and see how they compare. Jellyfin is easy to set up and no more difficult than Plex to expose to the internet if you want to avoid the tolls. Run both side by side for a while — you might find the switch is about more than just escaping Plex’s paywalls.