Plex announces price increases for 2025, remote streaming of personal media no longer free...
Plex has announced that it will no longer offer free remote streaming for personal media and says its subscription options will see a significant price increase effective April 29, 2025.
Plex has announced price increases that will take effect on April 29.
The media streaming platform revealed its planned changes through a blog post on March 19. Plex said that its price increase will allow the company to keep "investing dedicated resources in developing new features." It will also help the platform deal with "rising costs," which have seemingly been passed on to end-consumers.
Both new and existing customers will have to pay more, the only exception being Lifetime Plex Pass holders. Every Plex Pass subscription option, including the monthly and yearly plans, will see a major price increase on April 29.
Specifically, the company's monthly Plex Pass will increase to $6.99, up from $4.99. A year-long Plex Pass will set users back $69.99, while the current annual purchase option is $39.99. Lifetime Plex Passes saw the most drastic increase, as the new $249.99 price tag is more than double that of the existing price point, which is $120 at the time of writing.
Plex also explained that its remote streaming option for personal media will no longer be available as a free service without exception. Instead, as of April 29, users who wish to stream personal media libraries on a remote network will need to jump through a few hoops.
Users will be able to stream media at no charge from a Plex Media Server as long as the server owner has a Plex Pass subscription. Alternatively, users with a Plex Pass of their own can stream from any server they have access to, even if its owner doesn't have a Plex Pass subscription.
Remote media streaming can also be achieved through the newly announced "Remote Watch Pass" subscription. This will let users remotely stream media from any personal media server to which they have access. In this case, neither the server owner nor the users who stream the content will need to have a Plex Pass.
The Remote Watch Pass subscription will be priced at $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. Plex describes it as a more "cost-effective" option for users who may not need all the features made possible by the standard Plex Pass.
As Plex has effectively established a paywall for its remote media streaming feature, the company has understandably decided to get rid of its one-time mobile activation fee. The fee, which will be replaced by subscription requirements, removes one-minute play limits when streaming to an iOS or Android device from a remote server.
Though the remote streaming of personal media will now require a Plex Pass or Remote Watch subscription, users will still be able to stream content within their local networks for free. Plex's price hike does not come as much of a surprise, as multiple companies have announced higher prices for 2025, including the likes of Netflix.
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Comments
They do have a business to run and there are costs to all this. I'm pretty sure they're not raking it in like Apple, though. But it's important they do survive.
But will Plex still be here in 5? 10 years? I'm sad to say, I don't think so.
I use it every day but there's no way even a moderately computer literate user can keep tabs on what it is supposed to do (often presented in language akin to 'it's magic, you can't go wrong').
I don't know what went wrong with Alexa integration for example even though that was announced ages ago. Then again even Alexa sometimes has trouble finding my Amazon Music playlists.
For a system that is network dependent it really needs something like Apple's old Airport Utility to setup and troubleshoot network issues for people who don't have time to break their brains to find a glitch hidden deep in the server settings.
I used to have a local home sever, large NAS storage with tons of local media. Not anymore.