If you have ever wanted to buy Plex’s lifetime pass to keep streaming your movie collection to your iPhone, get it now before the price rockets up to a ludicrous $749.99 on July 1.

Price rises are a regular occurrence for most online services, and that even includes self-hosted streaming platforms. However, for a particular segment of Plex users, one extremely expensive jump in price is on the horizon.

Back in May, Plex warned that it will be raising the price of its Lifetime Plex Pass, which gives users all of the benefits of the normal annual or monthly Plex Pass, but without a subscription. That price rise is set to take place on July 1 at 12:01 a.m. UTC.

As for the amount the price will go up by, it’s not a small amount. Instead of the current $249.99 pricing, it will be going up to an eye-watering $749.99.

In justifying the price, Plex admitted that it had previously considered removing the Lifetime Plex Pass altogether. While recurring subscriptions sustain long-term development, the lifetime pass does not, and becomes less useful to Plex as time goes on.

The new price, according to Plex, “reflects the real, ongoing value of the software we’re committed to building and maintaining for years to come.”

Does this affect me?

The price change is something that really only matters to a small section of Plex’s user base. Those who don’t feel like paying the monthly or annual fee and believe they can get years of use out of Plex.

There are no changes to the monthly $6.99 or annual $69.99 subscriptions. It’s only affecting the lifetime version.

The current $250 price may seem hefty for a user to pay, but that’s the equivalent of three and a half years of the annual subscription in terms of cost. Or just under three years of paying the monthly plan.

By contrast, the $750 price change works out to be the same cost as just over ten years of the annual subscription.

Existing Lifetime Plex Plan users won’t have to pay anything extra, as they already have the plan. There won’t be any change of service either, as planned future changes affect all paid plans equally.

Consider your options

Current monthly and annual subscribers who are happy to continue paying the fee can carry on without worry. For those who were tempted but didn’t pull the trigger on the Lifetime Plex Plan previously, they have an incentive to get it now.

A 200% price increase is certainly a good incentive for fence-sitters to pay up.

That said, the market has changed, and maybe those users wanting to save a bit of money could consider a completely different option. One that was free, if you’re not afraid of a little work.

Rival app Jellyfin is free to set up and use in mostly the same way as Plex. Where Plex succeeds is in having a massive community and product support, whereas you’ve got more research to do with Jellyfin.

There’s also the alternative content sources Plex offers, but that’s a minor thing compared to the main functionality.

That said, it’s not that difficult to get up and running with Jellyfin. It has many of the same features as Plex, including fetching relevant metadata for your collection, as well as apps for many devices you would want to stream to in the first place.

Ultimately, this is a good opportunity for everyone to take stock in their setups, and to really work out what they want from their home streaming server.

You could “save” money by paying for the lifetime Plex upgrade now instead of suffering later. But you could also save by switching to Jellyfin and avoiding subscriptions altogether.