Jellyfin to quadruple their prices following Plex's price increases
26d 1h ago by lemmy.world/u/eager_eagle in selfhosted from old.reddit.com
If you haven't seen it yet, we recently made the announcement that starting July 1, 2026, the price of "Jellyfin Premium+ One Super Unlimited (with Ads)" will increase to $0.00 USD*. There has been a lot of enthusiasm regarding charge backs, and we're simply blown away by the community's response.
As we've had a high volume of inquiries, I'd ask if you could please wait until I'm off the support email shift to reach out about this issue. I've attached our schedule so you'll know when it is safe to reach out.
Thanks, and happy streaming!
*Example price in USD. Exact pricing in other currencies may vary.
Thank goodness I got a lifetime Jellyfin license years ago!
I just keep getting the cracked versions
Yeah, some dude named jellyfin on Github keeps uploading the latest versions
Eh, I'd rather fork out the money than try the 1% chance GitHub is up to download it. Piracy is a service issue
Just mirror it locally in that small GitHub uptime window.
Yeah, I really missed the boat getting in on it when it was $0.00...
Now I'd better get it at $0.0 before it shoots up to $0 next year.
yeah, the cynic in me thinks they’re just stoking the fomo to get more sales
So true! But I found a trick where you can get Jellyfin cheap if you buy it pretending to be a resident of another country. Here's some prices:
- Vietnam - 0₫ (VND)
- India - ₹0 (INR)
- Indonesia - Rp0 (IDR)
- Philippines - ₱0 (PHP)
- Thailand - ฿0 (THB)
- Mexico - Mex$0 (MXN)
- Brazil - R$0 (BRL)
- South Africa - R0 (ZAR)
- Turkey - ₺0 (TRY)
- China - ¥0 (CNY)
- Malaysia - RM0 (MYR)
- Egypt - E£0 (EGP)
- Argentina - AR$0 (ARS)
- Japan - ¥0 (JPY)
- South Korea - ₩0 (KRW)
- Singapore - S$0 (SGD)
- Australia - A$0 (AUD)
- New Zealand - NZ$0 (NZD)
- Canada - C$0 (CAD)
- United Kingdom - £0 (GBP)
- European Union countries - €0 (EUR)
- United States - $0 (USD)
I paid $0.02, but due to the penny shortage it rounded down to $0.00.
In Ukraine, you'd regularly get a box of matches instead of the equivalent of pennies in small stores because they're nigh useless there
if taco johns sold it for that, it'd cost you $0.05. they round even 1c or 6c up to the next higher nickel.
@Zachariah
@eager_eagle
Have you not heard ? They will stop honoring it after the next update for totally reasonable reasons.
If you are quick you could get the special 20% off discount on your first month that they are offering to their highly esteemed lifetime subscribers !
it's a gimmick guys, this is done so the memorial day 75% discount sale sound like a good deal, don't be sheeple
something is wrong with my instance, I'm not getting any ads here
Perhaps you paid x10 extra to get it without ads?
Ooh, good deal.
To get ads on jellyfin you have to manually download and play them. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Thank goodness your subscription fees fund a quick and helpful support department! Open a ticket and they should help restore your ads!
You poor bastard. How do you even consume enough to sustain?
This is how you capitalize on someone else's mistake. Made me actually laugh.
It reminds me of Apple's response to Vista's pricing tiers in 2007.
During the Apple keynote that year they said there was going to be an OS X Basic for $129, an OS X Premium for $129, an OS X Business for $129, and an OS X Ultimate for $129.
Vista pricing tiers were absurd. It still is, but vista was extra.
yeah, it wanted a new computer. I installed it on a few boxes at work, it was pretty. In the end, driver issues and slow perf made it unreasonable
Few people even wanted vista for free
Even better when the world couldn't afford such outrageous required specs at that time, most were searching for low cost "netbooks" iirc
I decided to bite the bullet and just pay the price increase. I will be looking for other services to use before I am charged again. Does Windows Media Player work well for you guys?
I was using VLC, but after they converted their cost into a subscription platform of $0 a month I had to move. Was going to use Jellyfin, but now this... Guess I'm gonna have to start putting all my media on film
If you go the film route, consider using 8mm. Even though some people thinks it's still too experimental i find the file compression to be far superior (one third file size after transcoding my library from VHS -> 8mm film) and they barely burst into flames.
Besides who has movie nights without drinks nearby you can put on the fire?
Make sure you use mixed drinks and not hard liquor as that will not put out fire and make your insurance company really annoying.
I heard on AIM that Winamp is good.
It really kicks whips the llama's ass!
Whips!?
Listen, for pulling that out of my memories from 20 years ago, I'm pretty happy with it
Sips?
This is outrageous! Im four times madder about this than I was before!
That’s almost 5 times!
That’s almost 5 times!
hell make it 50 times!
I got the lifetime plan on Black Friday back when it was $0.00 I'm really glad I did that now
I'd rather donate $750 to Jellyfin than pay $750 to Plex for Lifetime.
No, really. We don't actually need your money. At least, not here and now.
We have over $24,000 in the bank, and with average monthly expenses of only ~$600, that's over 40 months (3.3 years) of runway! So, we have plenty of money for the near future.
Thus, at this time, we want you to seriously consider donating to the authors of Clients you use, instead of (or in addition to) the main project. Client support is the hardest part of the Jellyfin ecosystem to keep going, and most of them are maintained by only a single person or very small team.
- Joshua Boniface, project admin
So give that applause-cash to a jellyfin client dev!
that's the neat part, you can't. He does not accept donations. I tried
What a ripoff. I’ll be moving to plex thank you very much.
Same! They only tripled their price! Guess who's winning now.
Solid shitpost!
This post is making fun of plex. Fuck Plex.
Unbelievable! I just recently switched to and started paying for Jellyfin Premium+ One Super Unlimited (with Ads) to see if I wanted to pay the lifetime license. I’m moving to JamRudder instead! This is a disgrace!!!!!!!!!!
JamRudder
I'm dead
Does this mean I have to quadruple my donation?
I am not going to say no.
lol they got me.
I bought a plex pass about 5 years ago. I figured it would be a reasonable long term investment. I am starting to think I should have just gone with Jellyfin to start with.
I’m curious, was it a lifetime pass? If so, how does the price increase affect you?
It wouldn't really, but you should already see "the writing on the wall". Your own collections aren't prioritized, and who knows what they'll do next - putting ads into your own personal collections maybe?
The final straw was when sent that "you need to pay a monthly fee to do remote streaming" email. It was intentionally worded very unclear... and they just so happened to have a "bug" around that time where many users got an error message saying that they needed to buy it, which isn't true, because I had a lifetime pass on the server.
It didn't feel ethical for me to continue using Plex, when I needed to explain to some friends and relatives that they should absolutely not give any of their money to Plex.
It wouldn't really, but you should already see "the writing on the wall". Your own collections aren't prioritized, and who knows what they'll do next - putting ads into your own personal collections maybe?
A lot of people are too hung up on what could happen, rather than what is happening. I don't see anything other than my own media since Plex can remember that that's how I want to use it. In daily use I don't see any of their additional attempts to generate income. I can share with anyone easily and not expect them to mess with any VPN or other tricks to connect remotely, and neither do I have to set any of that up.
It's nice that there are good alternatives, but none of them are a complete replacement for Plex. Jellyfin users on lemmy are just in a very special bubble within a bubble.
Yep, it’s not a bug until they get called out.
Yeah, the reality is that the people who bought the Lifetime pass a few years ago have gotten their money’s worth several times over. Hell, in my first year alone, it saved me more money on streaming services than I spent on the lifetime pass. So I made my money back in less than a year.
Why? That investment is paying off as it’s now significantly higher priced and has more features behind it.
Jellyfin is not as good as Plex. The client is worse, the streaming options are worse, and the remote streaming and sharing is insecure and costs extra to do even remotely, pun intended, securely.
I find the clients ok, not great, but I haven't explored that space much, there are many more options than Plex. Plex seems to be making theirs worse. It actually seems like Plex tries to make my content in their client harder to find.
The real issue is jellyfin is not as good at finding metadata. I've overcome this with tinymediamanager, but it still isn't as good.
For secure remote streaming, I've got mine behind caddy with https (caddy does the let's encrypt dance it's really pleasant, even works with my free DNS provider), which seems about as secure as Plex was. Are there other security aspects I'm missing that Plex provides?
That's a fair point to bring up. You're right that it is an investment that has paid for itself in terms of a streaming service. Much better than hooking a laptop up to a TV and playing files directly, forgetting which episode you are on, or where you stopped watching a movie when you want to resume.
My thought with Jellyfin is that I don't generally watch outside my home network. I have sent invites to friends to watch my library, but none do. So most of the features I don't use at all. I could have saved myself the money, learned how Jellyfin works, and probably set it up exactly how I currently use Plex by now.
I can barely afford to pay attention, now they want 4x as much? Who the fuck can afford 4 * $0 in the current economy?!
That's $0 USD, that's like $0CAD plus $0 HST.
Dont forget the vat
I just got a refund, I'm moving to Real Player
Don't forget to renew your WinRAR license while you're at it.
He'll get to it after the buffering
It's only because it is a large mp3 okay?
Wait til John Jellyfin hears about this!
He's out golfing with
I remember I got Jellyfin Lifetime for only $0.00 back in like 2018 before that started unlocking all their new features behind a nonpaywall
I bought 10 licenses and will give them away for free. Just answer me the title of your favorite book. First come first served
The art of the deal. Which I've read so many times I will negotiate you down to just $200 for one of these licenses
Das Kapital
Capital Volume I
120 Days of Sodom
Mistborn
High Fidelity!
The paid subscription for a picture of Dorian Grey.
I recall a lot of people commenting how they were really happy with jellyfin after the plex increase
I am really happy with Jellyfin after giving up on Plex, after realizing they really do not care about their customers/users. We have a bug on LG TVs where Plex is incredibly sluggish, both to start up and to navigate. Even moving between elements on a single screen takes like 1.5 seconds.
Been a known bug to the developers for about a decade going by the forums. Devs have responded to this. They won't respond anymore. They don't care.
I openly suggested in the forum posts there, that people should move to Jellyfin, and that I was doing the same. Enough is enough. Plex used to be quite performance on my TV.
Jellyfin just flies, with the exact same library access.
Edit: there's a second bug which they've known about forever as well which is that Plex can't select the correct audio track no matter which one you select. It'll just pick English always (or perhaps the default/main track or whatever it is in a video container). Jellyfin handles this flawlessly. 👌
Jellyfin just flies
Idk about "flies", but it's tolerable. On older TVs it remains clunky, but usable. Also, definitely has it's share of bugs. But that's FOSS for you. I'm not going $750 out of pocket for it.
I have a TV from 2019, it surely flies on that. Compared to Plex anyway, with its 1–2s just to move a square outline from one movie poster to another movie poster, same hardware, same library. It's ridiculous. Jellyfin master race.
Also curious what kind of bugs you are encountering? I haven't seen any as of yet. Maybe one, where you are sometimes unable to back out of playing media with the remote back button and have to aim-click it with the cursor and middle button. Other than that I haven't seen anything else.
I have a TV from 2019, it surely flies on that.
I've got a newer TV from 2021 and it's great. On an older one from 2015 it surely does not.
Also curious what kind of bugs you are encountering?
Outside the latency, the biggest problem I have is matching shows to their metadata. Anything Disney related (Hocus Pocus, for instance) wants to tie itself to something totally random. Some anime (Frieren) refused to recognize the second season and keeps matching episodes to Season 01 titles/screenshots.
It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying and cumbersome. I've heard Sonarr/Radarr integration help, but then I'm down a rabbit hole of apps to support apps to support apps.
I just want something seamless and out of the box to organize my digital library, not a second job doing IT work to support a miniature Netflix.
Huh. Guess I'm lucky that I haven't run into these issues. No latency issues either, but I'm only using it on my local network anyway so I guess I'm gucci because of that fact.
Is it any better on a streaming box? Most smart TVs are slow as shit at everything. I have an LG and haven't even bothered with the smart functions. If I made decisions, smart TVs would be best effort, always.
I don't know what a streaming box is exactly but,
Most smart TVs are slow as shit at everything.
I don't think that's an excuse when all you need to do is show some pictures and text on screen, not even animate them. The video playing part works great, and streaming at UHD HDR 5.1 works fine. It's just the navigation part that Plex doesn't do well.
And like I said, it's even less of an excuse when Jellyfin doesn't have the same issue on the same hardware.
Another indication that Plex is doing something shitty is that the TVs own screensaver frame rate stutters when Plex is the open application. But not with any other app. So Plex clearly has some kind of working loop in the background that completely fucks its performance.
Welp, it's a good thing Jellyfin works for you.
Definitely happy about that. Feels great to be free of "using the free tier" and to instead be using a completely free solution.
Well that's it. I'm going back to USB sticks.
/j
There's always kodi and xbmc /j
Haven’t you heard the price of memory is skyrocketing?
Can I pay in installments?
Any changes to Jellyfin Premium+ One Super Unlimited (without Ads) this time? They just doubled it last year, if it goes any higher I'm out. I'm not gonna watch ads.
I heard that it was going 10x 🤪. My suggestion get a pihole and don’t pay the, checks calculation $0.00, plus you get ad blocking on a lot of the web.
Joking aside, I do have a lifetime subscription to Emby, which shares a lot of the same code as Jellyfin. But the lifetime subscription was $99 which I viewed as a thank you donation to the developer(s). In the past 5 years or so it has been an excellent value.
How is emby? I've got jellyfin running but...the people I share my media with aren't exactly tech savvy, so any tiny issue that occurs, I am having to fix it by going to their house.
Is emby, just plex easy? Cause that's why I started looking at plex until this price increase happened.
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby due to some drama I can't quite remember. Last I used Emby a few years ago, both looked and operated basically the same as each other.
Jellyfin has made improvements since. I can't speak for Emby since I switched to Jellyfin.
Wasn't the drama Emby going closed source?
Yes. That was why Jellyfin came to be. Emby was open them they went closed and everyone dumped them
Emby is jellyfin with extra support and development. The apps came out earlier and for more platforms. It supports IPTV. Theres some pretty responsive forum support. Jellyfin may have these things too, but I chose Emby at the time for its native WebOS app.
Jellyfin these days has a bunch of apps, both official and 3rd party, for ALOT of platforms: https://github.com/awesome-jellyfin/awesome-jellyfin/blob/main/CLIENTS.md. webOS alone has 4 different apps available.
Well damn, so I'm not going to get lucky with the easy button for family then.
That’s the same deal as Plex - people bought it as a thank you to developers as it basically gave you very little extra at the time.
Realistically, my ~$50 plex lifetime pass has been the best value purchase I’ve ever made in terms of hours of use to dollars spent. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of hours have been put on it.
dammit we have to donate even more now
We're going to need to double Bezo's taxes to pay for this.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
[Thread #309 for this comm, first seen 23rd May 2026, 14:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Is plex an acronym?
Not in this context, but I did find this one
PLEX - Programming Language for EXchanges
Good bot
I'll bet they're using dirty rounding tricks too to misrepresent the price. For all we know, it could be as high as 6600 Iranian rials. Outrageous.
I only have Francs, can you convert?
I will wait to buy it at black Thursday.
WHEREZ DO SUBSCRIBE JELLYFLIN?
Am I illegally using the docker container? Isn't jellyfin free?
Sir this is not Reddit. We read the content here.
Clicks link to Reddit.
... What the fuck.
Its a joke
you authorized the charge already
If running as rootless docker then it’s free. But, if running as rootful docker then pay up.
/s
Ngl, you got me there in the first half XD
Back when I was a kid zero dollars.. Er...pesos at the time... Meant something. It meant you could only go up from there.
Now, with all these CEOs getting in the way between you and a good time, now it means nothing! Whatever! Fine make it 10x as expensive! See if we care!
Love my jellyfin setup. Podman + roku app is 🤌
🤘
dude I don't even have $0 and I use Jellyfin tf am I to do?
It's cool, I bought one for you.
Don't trust that other guy. There's no such thing as a free lunch. I can offer it to you on a payment plan of 24 easy monthly payments of $0.
I’m going to pirate it
I found some guy had the files on github
See, Jellyfin is just as bad as Plex. /s
I'm never paying for that. Another Open Source software enshit...
Wait, never mind, my wife canceled out JF subscription to be able to buy q new purse and some shoes.
Carry on boys.
Ham and cheese sandwich.
Up vote for the one person who read to the end. I'm currently having breakfast so I can't contribute.
Fuck you Plex
Why arr you paying for Jrllyfin?
Link to article?
I know I'll be downvoted to oblivion but I've never had good luck with jellyfin. Plex has a lot of issues but in terms of just working, it's been far superior ime.
Have you tried trying again?
Actually yes, I've tried jellyfin like 3 times now. I'm sure I'll try it again.
When did you last try cause comparing now to a few years ago is night and day
Eh, probably 10 months ago.
You're not the only one. I've been having an issue where Jellyfin just decides to use 90% of my server's memory and cpu just for giggles and I haven't had the time to unravel it so it's just unusable at the moment.
Turn off transcoding and/or unify the codecs on your totally legally acquired library that you legally ripped yourself.
Is this a joke? Jellyfin is free.
“Jellyfin Premium+ One Super Unlimited (with Ads)” will increase to $0.00 USD*
Does this look like a joke to you? Jellyfin and their typical price hikes. They'll probably cut the pay of their volunteers next, if I had to guess.
This is very serious...
...now it's free x 4.
If you can't see why people subjectively like new stuff, that's not something anyone can really help you with. You're welcome to watch the office or whatever on repeat for the rest of your life, or simply not watch TV, but to say you fundamentally can't understand why anyone would watch anything new says more about you than them.
Sure dude keep trying to convince yourself people have issues for posting comments on comment threads.
What does this have to do with new TV shows and films?
A lot of people would consider the period just after 2005 to be a lot of the best TV ever made.
To archive the good ones, because you are correct. Modern stuff is mostly just crap.
huh, funny. if Plex did something like this all the jellies would lose their fucking minds.
but no, y'all keep rolling around in the toxic waste dump you call jellyfin.
Read the post title and rushed straight to the comments?
no, I know it's all in jest. but similarly if Plex would mock jellyfin like this the jellies would be big mad.
What would there be to mock? They could talk about bugs or features, but those are things that get updated with time on JF as well as Plex. Every other change is to do with enshitification which is a proprietary issue.
always have to be right, don't you guys?
you're not even arguing that the JF community would react differently. you're arguing that the Plex team has nothing to mock JF for. that's rather pretentious of you.
you keep being toxic and I'll keep using Plex.
It's embarrassing that a post like this makes you feel personally attacked.
you know, you're absolutely right. you should be embarrassed.
I'm not the one making up posts mocking how a competitor runs their business, now am I? no...thats the core team from JF doing that. how pathetic. I guess this is why JF development is so slow, they're too busy mocking other products.
good luck with all that toxic bullshit. I'll be watching movies on Plex. Oops, sorry, that probably makes you mad knowing that, huh?
Really spammy today with all the Jellyfin glow up and Plex bashing. Plex works great, if you didn't get a Plex Pass over a decade ago for $20 that's your loss. Organisations can't offer great services for free. Eventually Jellyfin will have to start charging, and eventually they will "suck" as well. You young people haven't been on this rollercoaster long enough to see history repeat itself again and again and again. So have fun with your Jellyfin
Not sure if serious, but you're aware jellyfin is FOSS and selfhosted, right?
Eventually they will add features or have to add functionality that incurs licensing costs that will have to be passed on to users in exactly the same way as Plex found
Why? Why exactly would they have to add something that requires licensing? And if they do, why would the community not simply fork it to remove it?
Money?
Correct. I like keeping my money so I would instantly switch to a free fork.
With respect, I think you're misunderstand what FOSS is. You're applying business logic to a free, open source project, with strong community support. Here is the Jellyfin source code. It includes everything you need to freely build the software including all of it's history and context. Here are improvements that are currently being reviewed, most of them are not from members of the org, but just users of the software who want to make it better.
Anyone can make a copy, or a new base project as a "fork" and if that new fork is still free where do you think all the donations are going to go?
You've been around all this time but can't distinguish between an open source project and a private company's offerings? Come on now...
Why?
[citation needed]
Organisations can't offer great services for free.
The point of self-hosting is that you're not dependent on a service from a company. You're literally hosting the service yourself. Also with Plex. So essentially you're paying them AND you're doing the work for them.
And no, why would Jellyfin have to start charging? That's the whole point of FOSS software. They get their money from donations and support programs and whatnot. They don't have to succumb to the bullshit that is perpetual growth.
This poor sweet summer child suffering from normalised enshitificaton Stockholm syndrome.
if you didn't get a Plex Pass over a decade ago for $20 that's your loss.
Oh wow, look at you!
You're conveniently ignoring the part where Plex requires you to have an account on their server and has had a recent data breach. JF has exactly zero risk of that.