The $500 Price Increase

Plex sends a message to the self-hosting community with a massive upcharge targeted at the very people who hate monthly fees.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,…