[fetus8]

How can they justify an exponential price increase like this? The blog post doesn’t really mention new features aside from bringing features from the desktop website to the mobile app…

Even though I bought my lifetime membership years ago, I think it’s time to explore other options. I don’t like this.

[protimewaster]

I can think of a couple of possible explanations.

One is that they don't really want to sell a lifetime subscription, but it'll look bad if they discontinue the option. This way, they effectively don't sell them anymore, but there aren't people all screaming "They've discontinued lifetime subscriptions. How long until they take away the ones they sold before?!"

Another possible explanation is that it's just a ruse to sell more subscriptions. They probably sold a ton of subscriptions last time a price increase was announced. So, if they need a cash infusion, just announce another price increase. Then, when it turns out nobody buys at $750, decrease the price later on to return to normal.

[frenchtoast8]

TFA outright states that they don’t want to sell the Lifetime option anymore but don’t want to rug pull customers that want it, so they’re increasing the cost substantially to a price they’d be happy with

I’m curious how they determined $750 is fair. Is it just N * Annual_Price and if so why is this value of N fair? But they likely won’t say

[greycol]

It's literally called fuck off pricing. A price that's so high you get the buyer to fuck off so you don't need to deal with them, and if they buy it anyway you're happy with the ludicrous mark up. The $750 isn't supposed to be fair it's I don't want to deal with the maths on making money off this figuring out what inflation will be for the next 100 years or the maths for actual lifetime or server improvements deflating expenses etc etc so just get a subscription or fuck off.

[Larrikin]

Jellyfin continues to be a noticeable downgrade from Plex, but it is chugging along to being as good. If you're already a Plex lifetime subscriber the only logical move is to make sure your library is setup in a way that is compatible with both. There is no reason yet to switch away from Plex, unless you've had that terrible UI forced on you on Roku. I can switch at any moment when ever some MBA decides to enshittify something important.

I have no idea who will ever buy a lifetime pass at 10x what I paid for Plex in 2019. I struggled with the decision to pay $75 back then. There were effectively zero competitors to their product then.

[RajT88]

JellyFin is janky, but free. When something goes wrong, you can fix it.

The big thing is time investment. It is not for people who need it to "just work" - it is very much a tinkerer platform at this point.

[unethical_ban]

Jellyfin hardware transcoding is free, where Plex isn't. Biggest reason I originally switched. Iirc Plex library management and indexing is better.

Oh and user management is local, which I prefer.

[goolz]

Ya this is what I remember alienated me from Plex. Zero complaints with Jellyfin all these years.

[frez1]

yeah, this only applies to lifetime subscribers

[flir]

Plex is trending worse, though (Oh, I see you've mentioned the non-web interface. Carry on then.)

[chillfox]

Happy I went with Emby, it's been solid for several years now.

[crorella]

Same! At first I was wary of using it because the UI looked less polished, but from the start the stability has been vastly superior and now the UI is much better too.

as a bonus, I have a old version Emby Theather (the windows form based one) that plays 4K with no issues on my computer unlike browsers that fail at that.