For nearly two decades, Plex has served as self-hosting’s great gateway drug.

It’s the one self-hosting tool that normies know about, and it looks slick and modern. (It’s even a streamer itself these days!) Despite the fact that it’s often associated with piracy, it has transcended its roots in the Xbox homebrew scene—it started as a Mac-oriented fork of XBMC, which became the modern-day Kodi—to become a legit business.

The rub, of course, is that it’s not open-source like most of the other tools people self-host. But Plex more than made up for this failing by offering an add-on service that added additional features to the free app. For more than a decade, you’ve been able to pay the fine folks at Plex a one-time fee, and boom, you have the full-fat service forever.

And for years, that fee was under $100—sometimes well under it. (I got it in 2024 on a discount, and I paid $91 for the honor.) At a time when Adobe seemed to charge an arm and a leg for its software with glee, Plex’s model felt like the right balance for consumers.

But clearly the deal wasn’t quite so good for the company, because this week the company felt compelled to raise the already elevated price of this lifetime subscription by an eye-watering $500, from $249.99 to $749.99. Their reasoning is pretty plain when all laid out:

We’ve considered eliminating the Lifetime Plex Pass in the past, given that recurring subscriptions help us sustain long-term development, but we know it’s still a valuable option for many in our community. So instead of retiring it, we’re keeping it available at a price that reflects the real, ongoing value of the software we’re committed to building and maintaining for years to come.

Just like everyone else, Plex needs money to pay for its service. But the problem is, people specifically use Plex and products like it to get away from the SaaS business model. Hence the impasse. By charging so much for it that the average person is not going to be willing to get past the sticker shock, Plex weeds out the people who aren’t good for their bottom line long-term.

Those people, rather than paying more than the price of the mini PC they use to host their Plex libraries, are most assuredly going with an alternative like Jellyfin.

But this tension is not new—far from it. A few years back, FUTO had then-spokesperson Louis Rossmann pushing for a form of open-source that encouraged payment by users. FUTO’s big self-hosted tool is the excellent Immich, so they have a horse in this race just like Plex. The problem is, FUTO’s pitch isn’t really open source. While Immich uses the more common AGPL v3 license, other FUTO projects like Grayjay use the Source First license, which encourages payment for commercial use.

(By the way: I see FUTO now states directly on its website that it’s not a nonprofit. I’d like to think my piece from 2024, which specifically called out that lack of clarity, led to that statement.)

Self-hosting is an extremely exciting scene these days, as I wrote about a couple of months ago. (I have plans to write a guide to apps you should be trying very soon.)

But if the model is ultimately unsustainable, that’s not good for the self-hosted community, either. And I think Plex, by announcing this insane price increase, they’re making it clear that they ultimately do not see this model as sustainable for real companies. (The counter-argument that carries water with me: Most users did not ask Plex to get into the streaming or content-licensing businesses.)

There’s a consistent tension that the Plex news hints at: End users want ownership of the tools they use, but those tools require different business models than the buy-once software of yore. You could reasonably argue that since we’re no longer buying software in boxes, we have a different expectation of maintenance than we once did. But on the other hand, there are plenty of cases where we weren’t necessarily asked whether we wanted new features added to the software we use. (I think if Adobe still shipped standalone Creative Suite versions every year and charged $1,000 for them, people wouldn’t be begging for feature updates every year.)

The truth is, if you run a business, a consistent stream of revenue is better than a flood of revenue that turns into a sputter. (A stream of revenue that becomes a flood is even better, if you have the infrastructure to manage it.) But when every drop of our paychecks is already accounted for before we’ve even saved anything up, SaaS feels exhausting. Plex’s move only leans into that exhaustion.

I think Plex’s problem is that it’s straddling two worlds, only one of which can realistically support a big company. Self-hosting is great for users and hardware companies, but there’s no way in heck it is as profitable as a money spigot.

The company had to make a choice. It might just push the next generation of self-hosted users to alternatives like Jellyfin and Emby. But that’s okay. Plex still has its normies.