this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Not sure if you've seen the recent announcement but plexamp is free now. They've changed their approach and instead of the whole app being restricted to plexpass users, you can now use some features for free while the more advanced features are still locked to plexpass users. One big asterisks is that all the sonic analysis features will not work if the server owner doesn't have a plexpass.
Also, your family can definitely access your plexpass perks, you just need to add them to your "Plex home". I believe you can add up to 15 users to your home, just make sure you don't add them as "managed users" as that will require them to login with your account.
I had seen that today, I was already annoyed that one of my users can't cache/download from my server despite that not being a restriction for general server users at the time of purchase.
I was aware of the workaround, but as most of my users are outside my home, I did not want to bind their accounts to mine, I just wanted to share my personal server with their independent accounts.
I should be happy that today's addition is more than what we had yesterday, but I am still disappointed at what is an arbitrary restriction for the purpose of upselling to my users, something I had thought I had paid for future development of and is not useful or appropriate enough to justify the cost to them.
I had decided that I should pay for current and future feature development for my server and its users, I now feel that the features I payed in advanced for are being paywalled in a way that is unlikely to garner more income from my friends/families and only results in me getting less out of what I thought I paid for, personally I don't use my server as much as it was intended for those users.
I definitely agree with you that some of the restrictions feel very arbitrary (basically everything that doesn't use sonic analysis should be in the free tier imo). Especially with how bad of an experience music playback is without plexamp. Even as a lifetime plexpass users, I feel they shouldn't have offered it if it would lead to the situation we have today where they need to get "creative" with monetization since their core users only paid a one-time fee.
To clarify my earlier post, you can definitely allow them to keep their independent account even if they're in your Plex home. You just need to select "invite Plex user" instead of "create managed account". It's not a perfect solution as it gives all those users access to each other's accounts if no pin is set afterwards. That being said, I personally don't find that a huge limitation as I wouldn't share my server with anyone that I wouldn't trust to respect that. I added a pin only so no one accidentally logs in on my profile as it would give them admin access, all the devices I use regularly I also enable "automatically sign in" so I really only ever need to input my pin when I log into a new device.