Plex's Lifetime Pass Is Gone: The Messy Reality of Switching to Jellyfin

So Plex has basically killed the Lifetime Pass. The price jumped to $250 USD before they stopped selling it altogether, and the online discourse has predictably split into two camps: people saying “just switch to Jellyfin, it’s easy,” and people who’ve actually tried to switch everyone in their family to Jellyfin.

Those are very different groups.

I’ve been following this closely because I’m in the second group. I run a small Plex setup that my wife and teenage daughter use, plus a couple of extended family members who I foolishly told about it years ago. So “just use Jellyfin” is a fine answer for me, sitting here at my desk with a terminal window open. It is a substantially less fine answer for my mother-in-law, who uses a mid-range Samsung TV and whose entire model of computing is “press the button that makes the thing happen.”

The honest picture of Jellyfin in 2025 is this: if everyone in your life uses Android devices, a Fire Stick, or a desktop browser, it’s genuinely excellent and you should probably make the switch. The server software is solid, the Android TV app is reliable, and self-hosting your own media without phoning home to a US company feels good in a quiet, principled sort of way.

The iOS situation is messier. The official Jellyfin app on iPhone and Apple TV is essentially a web wrapper, and a fairly rough one. Swiftfin is a proper native rewrite and it’s improving, but the Apple TV version has lagged behind. Infuse is the option most people land on, and it’s genuinely good, but then you’re paying a subscription fee to watch media you already own, which rather undercuts the appeal of leaving Plex. The ecosystem of third-party clients (Streamyfin, Divaarr, JellyTV, Moonfin) is expanding fast, which is encouraging, but also means you’re making a bet on which one survives the next twelve months.

I don’t think this is a dealbreaker, exactly. But I also don’t think the people saying “Jellyfin is ready” have fully reckoned with the support burden of running a media server for non-technical users. The setup isn’t hard for someone like me. Explaining to someone in their sixties that they need to sideload an app, or remember to connect a VPN, or use a different app than the one that came up when they searched: that’s a different kind of hard. It’s a social and patience problem, not a technical one, and no amount of GitHub commits fixes it.

There’s also a device access question that doesn’t get discussed enough. Plex works on PlayStation. It works on Xbox. It works on very old smart TVs. Jellyfin’s app availability for game consoles is essentially nonexistent, and the Samsung TV situation, while improving, is still patchy. Plenty of families watch everything through a PS5 now, mine included on weekends, and “just get them a Fire Stick” is a reasonable workaround but it’s still a workaround.

None of this makes Jellyfin bad. It makes Plex’s decade head-start on device relationships visible in a way that’s easy to overlook when you’re benchmarking it on your own hardware.

The thing is, Plex’s trajectory is also genuinely concerning. Features get removed or deprioritised. The live TV client is apparently a mess. The company keeps pushing towards a streaming service model that nobody asked for. Paying $250 AUD-plus for a lifetime pass to software that may continue to erode underneath you is its own kind of risk.

So the real question isn’t “is Jellyfin ready?” It’s “ready for whom, and at what cost of ongoing effort?” For a solo setup or a technically literate household, it’s ready. For a sprawling multi-family arrangement across different device types and different levels of technical patience, it depends enormously on how much unpaid IT support you’re willing to provide indefinitely.

I’m genuinely torn. The principle of it appeals to me, the open source model, the no-phoning-home, the fact that the project exists because people forked Emby when it went closed source and just built the thing themselves. That’s a good story. I want it to win.

But I also know that the next time something breaks at 8pm on a Tuesday and someone texts me asking why they can’t watch anything, I’m going to wish the path of least resistance was a bit less resistant.

I’ll probably migrate eventually. The Samsung app situation improving is meaningful. The Apple TV client getting a proper rewrite is meaningful. The window where switching feels obviously worth the friction is getting closer. It’s just not quite there yet for everyone, and it’s worth being honest about that rather than pretending the gap doesn’t exist.