Agreed, these are two different things meant for two different purposes. At this point nothing beats audiobookshelf

From the forum post:

Just because he works at Plex doesn’t necessarily make his review fake.

Yikes the copium here. Reviews are meant for users of the app, this is so incredibly biased and in bad taste. I have had my shittiest companies ask us to leave positive reviews on Glassdoor. The shittiest ones.

Maybe their big redesign that no one asked for isn’t doing well, and this is a self preservation thing, to get more people to download it. Maybe CEO asked them to. Maybe they’re just over eager. All are excuses and not valid reasons to give a rating on your own company’s product

Exactly how I’ve felt. I paid for a pass a long time ago, when they were actively making features for us server owners - but lately it’s been a good 80-90% of their crap content and very little for server owners. I’m not even upset about their content really, it’s just they blately have ignored everything else. It’s shifted, and so I have to as well.

You have had one of the more reasonable outlooks of this. I get that most of this stuff is fairly advanced for the average person who may be wanting to host, but anymore with letsencrypt, if you can port forward and spin up a container to run a plex server… you’re pretty close to just doing everything yourself. I don’t know why Plex feels the need to charge for “remote streaming” when from what I can tell, the most they’re doing is pointing a client at my server. As I said in other comments, it seems like a fancy dynamic DNS service, which is like, pennies for a multi year subscription. (Because it really doesn’t do much)

After posting, I get that deep now

I’m glad I’m not the only one. I’m getting a lot of vitriol here from people saying “Well your users are idiots”, or other angry things. No, my users are family members, and not everyone needs a degree in CS to be able to connect to a Plex server. A few of them are elderly. The email was misleading to them, on purpose. It threw many of them into a flurry. The whole thing was handled terribly by a company who keeps going out of their way to make it difficult for them already to simply watch my server.

I’d suggest trying Jellyfin out again. Personally I was in the same boat even just over a year ago, I wasn’t impressed, but it’s come a long way. It’s absolutely not as polished as Plex, but if you can look past that I’m finding most of the features I need are there.

Plexamp is honestly amazing. I’m investigating finamp, but I know it won’t be as nice. Them killing off the tidal integration did help the decision a bit though

If you consider paying a monthly fee for something that was free yesterday then I guess I’m wrong, go ahead and pay the subscription

Seeing how they now want 250 for lifetime Plex pass?! Over double what it was just a few years ago? Ridiculous, and us server owners haven’t seen really any new features come out recently. Jellyfin was a bit fiddly at first, but I’m getting used to it, and enjoying it more now I think

Yup, like why I bought Plex pass at the time. I was happy to pay for the good work they were doing. They had nice uis, their code was stable, and new features rolled out regularly. I’ll happily be doing the same for jellyfin.

Plex wants people to pay now for the same functionality. Big difference in my book.

Oh god playon. They burned me hard, and were shocked when I turned them down for 3 free months of generous free subscription fees. Never even checked, did they crash and burn?

For now

Yup, read through this thread and it becomes clearer and clearer. and trust me, I’ve been a long time hold out, I’ve been through this many times - but this is the first time I’ve seen functionality removed from Plex to be put behind a paywall. And doing a price hike at the same time. Absolutely shitty. I’ve already migrated off.

I don’t have an email, and I didn’t get any notifications in my plex dashboard…

Thing that has always been free for over a decade now suddenly costs a subscription even though there is no overhead to Plex

Yeah, don’t care, scummy thing.

It changes absolutely nothing, but it charges you $5 a month

Exactly my point. There’s some due hard people here saying that remote streaming is only possible because of plex’s servers, but that’s just not true. They act as fancy DNS or proxying, they lust point to your local server. That’s all. Regular DNS or even an IP and port are all it takes to get remote streaming up

I know I’m one of them, and at the time and even now I supported it. They were adding features, they did plexamp! It was great, and I was happy to help pay for development. Now though? Nothing worthwhile added in years, and just more ways to nickle and dime. Not to mention the ad-riddled free “content” they’re shoving in front of my users. Nope, I’m done. My lifetime plex pass ended up being about $10 per year that I used it, and I’ll say I’m content with that.

I don’t understand why people keep saying that. I can stream outside my network. Others can stream it from outside my network. That’s remote streaming in my book.

My users are upset, and that makes me upset. I’ve been fielding calls and messages from them for the last hour where they’re worried they have to start paying. So yeah, I don’t really care that it doesn’t apply to them, Plex sent an email that to the average user looks like they need to start paying. That was a shitty move on their part.

They could have done a banner on each client if they connected to a non-plex pass server and said “Hey starting in a few days, this won’t be free”, and left plex pass ones alone. They could have narrowed the emails down to “If you’ve connected to a free server in the last year”. It appears that they just blasted it out. I know for a fact that one of the accounts has never connected to a free server.e

And all of that is ignoring that it was free for a decade already, so why is it suddenly a “premium” service. So yeah, they bungled the entire situation, and I’m out.