I bought Plex pass years ago for £79. The new price of $749.99 is INSANE.
No wonder all the cool people are using Jellyfin.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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Plex works just fine without a subscription. What is the subscription even for?
It has centralised features like proprietary user sharing (which is neat but still), arbitrary limits like device limits, the ability to transcode using your server's hardware, and other stuff that Emby/Jellyfin users have as standard. So we generally see the restrictions as taking power and ownership away from our own media/hardware.
And any cool premium Plex features like merging multiple servers into one UI get adopted and ported into Emby/Jellyfin pretty damn quickly
Downloads for Offline Viewing (jellyfin has this for free) and Remote Access (stream videos while outside of your home network, you can just use tailwind with jellyfin for free)
What is this ‘offline’ thing I keep hearing about?
You can download media for when you’re not able to reach your server. I use it to be able to watch things on my iPad at work. My iPad automatically downloads the next few unwatched episodes for whatever I have queued. And whenever it reconnects to my server, (like when I connect to WiFi) it automatically syncs to update the downloaded episodes. That way I don’t need to connect to my employer’s WiFi.
You can download episodes/movies to your device for offline playback. Not groundbreaking, you could just copy the files to your device manually, but if you do it via the plex app it will sync your watch progress once you connect again.
You can also use it to bulk-download shows from other people's libraries.
Why would I need to copy the files to my media player when it can just stream from my NAS directly, regardless of internet connection.
Example - You have a tablet and want to preload content into the Plex app before a flight.
Well if you don't leave the house I'm sure that's fine. Some people use it to watch stuff when they're away, or if they have a job that lets them play something while they work.
I do leave the house but I generally don’t bring my home cinema with me.
I used it when I travel abroad and want to watch something, like when you're on a plane or train with shitty internet or roaming charges.
If you host a server and have a lifetime pass, you'll be able to share your collection with anyone. It will allow hardware encoding so less lag on your users end. You can also locally download content on your devices to watch offline.
So no useful features for me.
I don’t want to share my media with anyone and see no reason to stream from outside my house, it’s not like I can take my home cinema with me. Also, why would you want to re-encode and lower the quality?
Well in your case you don't need the subscription at all, apart from some minor things the subscription won't do anything for you.
But I do all the things you're not doing. I share my server with dozens of friends/family so I need remote streaming. I can watch shows on my own server no matter where I am (at work or when visiting relatives, or even on the phone on the train). And if you streaming on the phone or with bad internet in general it might sometimes be a good idea to reduce quality to save bandwidth.
I really would like to use Jellyfin, but the remote access is quite useful to me personally. My immediate family lives far away and they can access my library remotely quite easily. They just want to watch their requested shows and don't need 4k HDR 7.2 surround sound for their cooking shows.
I guess I could set up tailscale or some other vpn access to my network but I don't feel like explaining that to parents and siblings. Even my partner, who lives with me, has little patience for all things electronic. They're an Apple user and I'm aware enough not to constantly pester them with my ideals and preferences. Plex works on our Apple TV and is easy so it's the best solution right now. Am I in the minority? Probably, but different strokes for different folks.
TLDR: Jellyfin is awesome, but Plex currently makes more sense for my needs.
Just set up VPN between your router and their router, no need to explain anything.
Yeah, that's a potential solution, but then my sister's starting college soon so she'd need to VPN into one of the networks when she's not at home; which brings us back to square one.
Then there's whenever they're not home and want to watch something on their phone or laptop.
Jellyfin is quite easy to use remotely (prerequisite: purchased domain (easy), tunnel VPN (complex) or public static IP (not always an option)). I confess I use Emby as I bought premium for it once I learned how much it suits me, and the UI is much nicer and rounded -- although I didn't need to pay in order to do most of what I wanted. I can say that my friends access the library with a one time login and minimal friction, but I'm also not going to preach further - sometimes it's better not to fuck with a working system, and I respect your choice
Similarly, I have a Plex lifetime license.
I think my biggest hurdle for Jellyfin is setting up a VPS for all my self hosted services. Currently I use Cloudflare Tunnels, which is easy but I'd like to get away from it because Cloudflare and it doesn't allow for streaming services to run on it.
I'll spin up Jellyfin and see how Swiftfin is on the Apple TV. If I feel it has minimal friction I'll try and make the jump.
With regards to spreading the good word of self hosting, I've had the best luck just offering good services to those around me. Spliit, HomeAssistant, and Immich have been easy to get my partner to use. Then I just happen to say "oh yeah, this is running on my server btw". The holy grail would be to convince my friends to use Fluxer or something instead of Discord.