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Plex Pass’ $750 lifetime price is for suckers

Jared Newman   |   May 22, 2026

Plex is pulling up the ladder on anyone who wants to run a home media server without a subscription.

On July 1, the cost of a lifetime Plex Pass will jump from $250 to $750. While Plex’s core media server features are free, the subscription is required for over-the-air DVR, hardware-accelerated streaming, mobile downloads, and other advanced features. It also covers out-of-home access to your server content, which otherwise requires a separate standalone subscription with no lifetime option.

Plex is doing right by its existing customers and honoring previously-purchased Plex Passes at no extra cost, and it’s giving prospective customers a couple months to jump on board at the current $250 price. On a recurring basis, Plex Pass still costs $7 per month or $70 per year—prices that took effect after a previous hike in April 2025.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting more predictable revenue streams, but charging $750 for the alternative feels a bit insulting without stronger assurances of where Plex Media Server is going. If Plex is still going to bother with lifetime Plex Passes, it ought to prove that the investment will be worth it.

Read the full column →

Weekly rewind

Hulu (still) isn’t going away: This week, Disney+ added a way to link your profile from Hulu, allowing your watch history and recommendations to sync between apps. But the line that got more attention in this Variety piece was Disney’s assurance that “there are no current plans to sunset the Hulu app.”

This isn’t news. Disney told me the exact same thing last October. Still, a lot of sites erroneously reported last year that Hulu will go away in 2026, to the point that I still get emails from folks who think that’s the case.

While Disney does want to to bring the full Hulu experience into Disney+, that’s still going to take a lot of work, especially for Hulu’s live TV service (and corresponding DVR features). Even then, Disney has always said that Hulu will remain available as a separate subscription, and it’s given no indication that it’ll kick happy Hulu users out of their preferred app. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Return of the Wiimote? Google is betting that we’ll someday want to navigate our TVs with motion-controlled “pointer” remotes instead of directional pads. To that end, it’s building support for mouse-style cursor control into Google TV and encouraging app makers to do the same.

I don’t know about this. Lots of companies have tried mimicking mouse-style input on TVs (including Google, with the failed original iteration of Google TV from the early 2010s). This never works because it requires an attentiveness that runs counter to the goal of just relaxing on your couch. I’m not yet convinced that Google’s big AI-on-TV push will do much to change people’s minds.

But if Google’s really into the pointer remote concept, perhaps it’ll release a new streaming device that uses it, and we’ll get to see who’s right.

More catch-up

Save more money

This part of the newsletter has some affiliate links, which earn me a commission if you wind up buying or subscribing to something.

Most streaming services didn’t bother celebrating Roku’s entirely-made-up “National Streaming Day” on May 20, but Roku itself has a whole bunch of premium subscriptions on sale through May 25.

The offers include two months of Apple TV+ for $6 per month, two months of MGM+ for $1 per month, and three months of Discovery+ for $3 per month. Note that these are billed through Roku and accessed via the Roku Channel app. Full deal list here.

Other notable deals:

As always, a full list of up-to-date deals lives here.

This week in Advisorator: I wrote about how the MacBook Neo rendered my iPad pointless.

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Thanks for reading!

That’s all for now. Got questions? Reply to this email and I’ll do my best to answer.

Until then,
Jared

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