Should I pay for Plex Premium?
Tags: Home Theater, Plex, Streaming

If you’re asking this question, you’re probably in a situation similar to mine — you’re using Plex, but unsure whether it is worth the cost of premium.

I spent a lot of time researching the features, and running Plex both with, and without Premium, and wanted to share my learnings.

So, is it worth it? The short answer for most people is sadly, probably not. I think it is sad because the Plex team has created a great product. However, they have the problem that every freemium software creator has — how do you make the base product appealing enough to drive adoption, yet offer sufficiently compelling features in the premium version so people will want to pay for it?

The longer answer is really dependent on how you use Plex. Let’s start with a quick overview of the Premium-only features (feature list as of early 2021):

Live TV and DVR functionality

Mobile Sync and Downloads

Premium Music and Photo libraries

Hardware-accelerated streaming

Custom user management and sharing restrictions

Bandwidth Management

Camera upload

Early Access & Preview Releases

Free Access to Plex Apps

Ad skipping — not listed on the premium features page, but appears to be a premium-only feature.

Not all of these features are equally valuable. You can read more about these features on the Plex site, but in my opinion, they don’t do a very good job of explaining why these features are important.

For me, and I suspect most of you, there are really only a subset of the features that may be useful to you. The most important I believe are:

Hardware-accelerated streaming

Custom user management/share restrictions

Bandwidth management

Free plex apps

ad skipping

These features share a general theme, which is that they are really only of value to users running Plex installations with multiple users.

For example, hardware-accelerated streaming (either CPU or GPU) is a bit more blocky than software-rendered, but has the virtue of freeing the CPU up for additional transcodes. Hardware today is such that even an old i5 is enough to run 2 or 3 simultaneous transcodes — the hardware support then is really only a factor when running installations where you are simultaneously running more transcodes than that. Keep in mind that many of the users may not need transcoding services.

The user management is obviously a key feature for these same users. The ability to bucket kids programming, and segment it from adult-oriented TV and movies is useful for those running multi-user installs. The bandwidth management is similarly useful.

The free plex apps are nice, but they are already so cheap (I paid $5 for the plex app for my iPhone and iPad) that they alone cannot justify the cost.

I enjoy the ad skipping feature, but most ads are in 30 second increments anyway that you can typically replicate the functionality with the 30 second skip ahead button.

If you decide to try the Plex Pass, I’d advise going with a monthly plan, or a yearly plan first to try it out. Each year, Plex runs specials on the lifetime subscription, which is probably the optimal approach if you find value in the premium service.

I hope that Plex continues to evolve the product and add new features, and I’m sure the “Premium or not” calculus will evolve with the product. However as of February 2021, Premium really only makes sense to me for these multi-user Plex installations.