The Plex $750 Lifetime Pass is a hard pass for almost everyone

Plex’s big Lifetime Pass price hike has now kicked in, meaning the one-time payment for premium Plex features has jumped from $249.99 to $749.99. Existing lifetime subscribers get to stay smugly grandfathered in at their old rate, while monthly and annual Plex Pass pricing remains unchanged. Given the eye-watering uplift in the price of the Lifetime Pass, we wanted to know whether readers saw it as a smart long-term buy or a shameless cash grab.

That rise was always going to be a hard sell, although Plex hasn’t exactly been sitting still since announcing it. The service has been rolling out new social and discovery features, which at least outwardly imply it’s trying to add more value rather than just price gouge. Since it was announced, we’ve looked at why $750 takes nearly 11 years to beat annual billing, why paying that much upfront for software access asks a lot of users’ faith, and how alternatives like Jellyfin and Emby make Plex’s new asking price feel even harder to swallow.

All that said, it’s not the hottest of takes to suggest that the price hike is very hard to justify. What we’re more interested in is how many of you are willing to justify it to yourself, and what you think the service is actually worth. We’ve been running a couple of polls on those points for weeks, and the results are finally in. First, let’s see how many of you plan to purchase a Plex Lifetime Pass at the increased rate.

The clearest result from the first poll is that most respondents are already safely on the other side of the paywall. Of over 2,100 votes, 61.4% said they already bought a Lifetime Plex Pass at a lower price. The next biggest group, at 25.9%, said they would move their media library elsewhere, while just 4.5% said they would still buy the Lifetime Pass at the new price.

That does at least hint at why Plex may have felt able to push the lifetime price so high. If most of the people who were ever likely to buy a Lifetime Plex Pass have already done so, Plex may see the remaining audience as smaller but more committed. The 4.5% figure looks tiny at first glance, but it isn’t quite nothing. Strip out the respondents who already own a Lifetime Pass, and almost 12% of the remaining voters still said they would pay the new $750 price. That’s not exactly a stampede to the checkout, but at three times the old price, Plex may not need one.

It’s worth noting at this point that Plex has also just added a new 5-Year Plex Pass plan for $250, which is exactly what the Lifetime Pass cost until this week. That works out cheaper per month than the annual or monthly subscriptions, but the timing is hard to ignore. The new Lifetime Pass is now the premium, high-commitment option, while the old lifetime price point has effectively been repurposed as a recurring subscription tier, albeit not a regular one. On that note, let’s check out the results of our poll on what you think the Lifetime Pass is worth.

The second poll makes the price hike look even more bizarre. Asked what they would pay for a Lifetime Plex Pass, 37% of respondents picked $120, while 32% said less than $100, and another 9.3% said they wouldn’t pay a dime. Put those together, and more than three-quarters of voters wouldn’t even go beyond $120. Another 19.6% chose $250, which was the old Lifetime Pass price until this week, meaning only a tiny slice of respondents were willing to go higher. Just 0.7% said they would pay $750, while 1.5% said they would pay whatever Plex charges.

This poll suggests the new Lifetime Pass price has almost no audience, although we need to put it in perspective. Firstly, it’s quite hard to put a cost on a lifetime pass for anything. Aside from the fact that very few of us know how long we’ll have left on the mortal coil, if we’re lucky enough to be around in 15 or 20 years, we have no idea what Plex and its rivals will be offering by then. It might not exist, or our tastes and priorities might change. Ask yourself what you wanted 15 years ago, and you’ll see what I’m getting at.

More saliently, there are very few people in general who are going to watch something triple in price overnight and say that it’s still worth it — hence the 0.7% of respondents who chose $750 in our poll. If Plex didn’t exist and then suddenly came to the market now with its content and new price structures, there may still not be many people willing to shell out $750 for a Lifetime Pass, but there might be more than 0.7%. At the very least, we could look at the package more objectively.

These polls were run across a few articles, and some of you provided further insight in the comments sections of those pieces. One recurring theory was that Plex may no longer want people buying Lifetime Passes, at least not in any meaningful number. As Stroth put it, “They clearly don’t want anyone to purchase it. They want to use it as a reason to no longer have it as a product.” Several others also read the move as a push toward steadier subscription revenue, with the lifetime tier technically remaining available but priced into the stratosphere.

They clearly don’t want anyone to purchase it. They want to use it as a reason to no longer have it as a product.

Naturally, there was a lot of relief among people who bought in early. Readers mentioned getting Lifetime Pass for $50, $75, $99, $120, and $149 over the years, which makes the new $750 price look even more startling by comparison. One heavy Plex user said they run a roughly 100TB library for their family, but added that, at $750, “I would have never built it.” That’s probably the awkward bit for Plex: even some of the people who clearly get a lot of value from the service don’t seem convinced the new price would have made sense at the start.

Unsurprisingly, Jellyfin came up a lot as the escape route of choice, and at least one member of the Android Authority team agrees. Some commenters said they already use it, while others suggested Plex’s pricing could push more self-hosting users in that direction. It wasn’t all presented as a painless switch, though. One reader said they tried Jellyfin but couldn’t get it working properly on their QNAP setup, then tried Emby before deleting it because they would have had to pay again for features they already had with Plex.

In any event, the $750 LifetimePass has certainly cost Plex some goodwill, but the service must have anticipated that. Welcome to capitalism.