All the folks saying "just buy the lifetime pass" gonna be in for a big disappointment in about 5 years
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Yep. Enshitification behavior doesn't cease once you're technically a paying customer. If they hadn't made a habit of enshitification. Clawing features away to put behind a paywall I'd give them some support. But I prefer foss anyhow. And for myself, I'm not missing anything.
And those lifetime subscriptions are also a trap. They know that you have the money and are willing to pay and that you're using their service. Do you really think that some business suit will be satisfied by your onetime payment back in 2022?
I got the lifetime pass 5 years ago. I've switched to JF because of the disappointment so far about a year ago.
JF is exactly what I wanted and needed plex to be, and everything added since is a worsened product. The lifetime pass was an attempt at getting the peace of mind of "then you just have it". If anything, only FOSS can give that.
Won't take that long before the enshittification is complete.
If we got 5yr it's more than paid for itself. Even FOSS needs support - stop whining and support good things.
Thing is, Plex turns out to be less and less of a good thing with each passing day. Bloat, spying, removal of features, price hikes etc.
If you want to pay for software that is good, there’s always Emby.
Already paid for Plex and it works. Im not in favor of every change they've made, but it's still damn solid and takes money to run.
The point being these whiners aren't going to run off and support FOSS/alternatives... Just leech.
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Is there any evidence that Plex has been spying? Genuinely curious. Sure they are closed source so we cant prove they are not.
There was the time that users started receiving emails from Plex telling them about other users and the shows they’ve been watching on their personal server, without permission. Spooked the hell out of me. There was allegedly a pop up that explained this new “feature” that was supposed to function as an opt-in. Problem was it worked more like an opt-out, as many of us never received the pop up, and weren’t even aware of the feature until people reached out to us to let us know Plex was sending them Emails about our library content.
PLEX is not FOSS, plex is a proprietary fork of XBMC.
My point is that in 5 years a lot of these plex users will wish they made the switch to jellyfin sooner.
Or Plex currently does everything they need it to, and $120 for 5+ years of keeping that going without any interruption of service is very reasonable. In the meantime, jellyfin will only get better and there might even be other options available by then.
Stop trying to make the issue black and white, one-size-fits-all. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for people to use both Plex and Jellyfin.
Or sunk cost fallacy, but whatever helps you justify paying $120 for software i guess. I dont think its a black and White one size fits all thing, i just have seen this patter before with other software, and it was already happening with plex before the price increase.
It's not sunk cost, dude. We agreed that $120 will get them 5 years of service that meets their needs. Even if they switch to jellyfin after 5 years, they still got their money's worth.
It's only sunk cost if they are worse off than if they had switched earlier. I guess if you're arguing that they would still have $120 if they switch today, I would argue they should still pay that $120 toward jellyfin's development. And that's assuming they have time to switch to jellyfin AND it fits 100% of their usecases, either of which could be untrue.
Sunk cost is more then just money... Every reply here is some variation of "i would switch but i have all my ratings and users settings in plex already and dont know how to migrate"
Which i can understand paying because you dont have time, i just also think its foolish to pay for a service like plex when the main use case is piracy, something a company like plex clearly can not continue to support legally forever.
Eventually the big media corps will decide they need to end all library sharing options and plex will not be able to win that fight.
whatever helps you justify paying $120 for software
Does that sound like a lot to you?
Considering the use I got out of it, even if I switch to something else tomorrow, the cost for the lifetime pass was peanuts. I'm sure others making that decision based on the situation today will feel the same in a few years. If Plex seems like the best solution today it's not going to fall off the cliff before $120 were worth it.
Not like FOSS projects are immune to bad decisions, and then you either fork it yourself or depend on unpaid volunteers to keep the version you like alive. There's always some risk.
Its about $60 more then ive ever paid for any software, and its literally a tool for piracy, why would i pay a company that clearly want to pivot to being a second rate netflix with ads, when i can get what i need for free and not support a shitty tech company.
It was the same thing with realdebrid, its just foolish to think these companies arent going to start cracking down on any kind of "sharing" features until eventually they get removed due to pressure from the anti piracy goons.
If you got your money worth thats great but id rather direct my money to projects that arent trying to profit off pirates until they can pivot to being a legit service and wall out what actually made them good in the first place.
Its clear at this point plex is getting worse and jellfin is getting better. Almost all the replies sayibg they still use plex have a "BUT" in them about wanting to switch and being stuck because they dont know how to transfer this or that (ratings, view counts, etc), which im going to look more into later to see if i can help with.
I just upgraded to lifetime and also use jellyfin but right now it only does 80% of what Plex does in my workflow so gonna use it until I can't anymore.
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Yes, do donate to FOSS projects. At least that money will go to people who do the actual work and not to pad corporate profits.
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I don't get the people down voting you... It's not like services are free. I've been paying for Plex since 2019, and I just recently got a lifetime pass. It's only fare to pay for it to use it ...
I've had a lifetime pass for years, but have considered making the switch several times. So far I've held back because, and correct me if I'm wrong, there are tools to transfer watch state, but not ratings, and while there's a plugin for dynamic collections, it's based on tags, so you can't just have a collection based on something like rating. My library also contains "custom" shows where there's no match for it online, so I've manually assigned it some details.
I think you're looking for https://github.com/arabcoders/watchstate Watchstate will pull from Plex and migrate it into a Jellyfin instance. Emby is also supported. Works with multiple users as well, just do yourself a favor and make sure all usernames match up!!!
I just used this to migrate from Emby to Jellyfin, works really well. I already have trakt setup on my main account but for my kid nothing goes out to the cloud so their account was all done with watchstate. It was also handy to keep Emby and Jellyfin in sync during the transition.
Thanks this looks great!
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I sync my watch history with trakt.tv -- I believe there are plugins for both Plex and Jellyfin which can transfer those watch histories via that service. I don't know of any other way.
Yeah this is what I did when I spun up a Jellyfin instance to play around with. For plex I used PlexTraktSync and the jellyfin trakt plugin to sync from trakt to jellyfin.
If someone wants my Lifetime Plex account they can have it.
oh no, this is the first im hearing about this.
I used this: https://github.com/arabcoders/watchstate
It works, really, really well. You just connect it to the servers, and it syncs them by user. You can even let it run regularly while you are in your transition phase as a docker container right next to Plex and Jellyfin.
Mine's even a bit more advanced, as I used samba-domain to set up an LDAP active directory for my fam, then the above to sync the Plex users to those users in Jellyfin, and it still worked great.
Edit: The WebUI is also pretty intuitive, but I did have to run it twice for my user the first time for it to get 100% in sync. Everything was fine after that.
Thanks! Sounds like the best option
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