Plex just tripled its lifetime price to $750 — here’s the free alternative that actually works

Plex is once again raising the cost of its Lifetime Pass, this time tripling from $250 to a staggering $750, effective July 1, 2026. The company claims the massive increase reflects the “real, ongoing value” of the streaming media server software, despite already doubling its cost in 2025.

For current Lifetime Pass holders, nothing changes. The monthly ($6.99) and annual ($69.99) subscription prices are also staying put this time, but the Lifetime Pass is a much better value over the long haul. If you’ve been on the fence, you have a six-week window to lock in the $250 rate before the $500 premium kicks in.

Plex Pass is great, but a hard sell at $750

The company is teasing future developments to justify it

At $250, a lifetime Plex Pass is still a solid investment if you want a polished, plug-and-play media server. I’ve used it for years, and though I’ve had a love-hate relationship with a few of Plex’s development and design choices, it’s been mostly pleasant.

It’s still the best media server if you value a “set-and-forget” experience, and the free version offers enough for a basic in-home streaming setup. It also has a selection of licensed streaming content and channels to access, plus comprehensive availability across a wide range of hardware platforms and third-party app support.

The Plex Pass enables hardware encoding, delivering higher-quality streaming without straining your CPU. It also provides simple remote streaming access without configuring your router, among other benefits.

Plex also shared a detailed roadmap of improvements it’s working on to justify the price hike:

• Improvements to Downloads, such as grouping by show and the ability to automatically download new episodes
• Support for Playlist creation and editing in the mobile apps
• Music and photo library support will be restored in the mobile apps and the new experience on TV apps.
• Support for NFO metadata
• All server and library management features currently available on app.plex.tv will be added to the mobile apps (and TV apps where it makes sense)
• Audio enhancements such as boosting dialog and normalizing loudness
• Additional transcoding video improvements
• IPv6 Support

You’ll have to decide for yourself if any of that sounds worth the added cost, but to me, it seems like an extraordinary price hike.

This free Plex alternative offers many of the same features

But setting it up is a bit more complicated

If you value these, locking in your lifetime access before July is the smart move. But at $750? That’s where the math stops making sense for most home theater enthusiasts.

If $750 is entirely out of the question, you should consider self-hosted alternatives like Jellyfin. As MakeUseOf’s Jorge Aguilar recently detailed in his breakdown of why he ditched Plex for Jellyfin, the latter offers almost complete feature parity for exactly zero dollars.

For example, hardware-accelerated transcoding and remote streaming are completely free out of the box — both highly sought features that Plex locks behind its paywall. Jellyfin requires more elbow grease to set up, particularly for remote streaming without a central relay server. But it keeps your data entirely local and doesn’t share data with any third-party servers.

OS

Android, iOS/iPadOS, Android TV, Fire TV, Web browsers

Developer

Jellyfin Community

Pricing model

Free (open-source)

Initial release

December 8, 2018

Jellyfin is a free-and-open-source media-server system that lets you self-host your movies, music, TV shows, photos and more and stream them to any device without subscriptions or third-party tracking.