Not sure, I would guess paying Oracle for another instance, attaching the target boot drive as a separate one to it and backing it up non-live, and to a better storage provider than NFS over Tailscale.

Or someone also said their custom images thing has a download option. That also needs payment.

Sorry if I came off that way. About misunderstanding the point - look at the other comments. People are making the same points as me. I don’t think I have misunderstood anything here, and I don’t think being a long response automatically makes it any less valid to understand how nuanced and all encompassing our dependence on third parties is.

You’re the one saying “this is a Wendy’s” which feels quite condescending in a post explicitly asking for opinions on how where Plex falls in the selfhosting community, including as defined in the sidebar.

• Domain I bought like 4 years ago for 20€, I think it’s 13€/yr
• A shitty VPN with port forwarding because I trust my ISP way less than I do the VPN, 36€/yr
• iCloud+ Mail - it’s 1€/mo and gets past all spam filters, has catch-all and doesn’t get in my way much
• ~0.05€/mo for network egress on a “free” GCP VM instance
• 0€/mo for my main server (Oracle can get fucked though, reprehensible evil company!)

That’s it for the recurring costs related in any way to my homelab.

Please don’t try to gatekeep software or turn selfhosting into a Professional Redditor Larper shitwar like iOS vs Android. Literally no one needs or wants that.

You can criticise Plex for its many shortcomings, that’s valid. Even better if you contribute to Jellyfin so it can overcome its shortcomings. But saying Plex is not self-hosted for puritan reasons is not a good look and smells like StackOverflow and elitist neckbeards; you’re disqualifying people from the community just because you, in your infinite pedantic wisdom, cannot comprehend that they also have valid reasons for using what they use.

By this logic:

• If you use the internet, nothing you access through it is self-hosted, because your ISP dictates if it’s allowed or not. Tailscale, WireGuard, OpenVPN, or a direct port connection are all subject to this. However you can access Jellyfin remotely is subject to this.
• Docker isn’t self-hosted - you depend on Docker Inc, their image registry will be aware of some details about your host, including your IP, which is technically PII and is directly linked to you.
• Let’s Encrypt certificates aren’t self-hosted because they’re an external CA and collect data like your email.
• Jellyfin is not self-hosted, it depends on TMDB and OMDB which are commercial or external.
• Pi-hole is not self-hosted as it depends in many cases on GitHub or external resources for its block lists, and it depends on public resolvers to operate.
• Ubuntu is not self-hosted because Canonical controls everything and has telemetry
• Neither is Windows, Mac, Debian, Arch, or even FreeBSD - they control updates and packages and if they randomly become evil, they have levers on you no matter what. Maybe TempleOS lol.
• Nextcloud is not self-hosted because they control the add-on store, update servers and has telemetry.
• The BitTorrent protocol isn’t self hosted because you rely on trackers and they collect telemetry about your client
• Media piracy isn’t self-hosted because you’re relying on other people to produce it for you
• If you get phone notifications, emails, messages, or whatever else - those aren’t self hosted. Even if you host Ntfy you’re still relying on Apple or Google notification relay servers.

I could go on.

By any stretch of this line of thinking, even the mere act of downloading any software in the first place disqualifies it from counting as self-hosted, because you didn’t build it from scratch and you depend on an external resource, your ISP, a DNS resolver, your operating system, your hardware (microcode, BIOS), your browser, and so on and so forth. The logic breaks down very fast. Don’t.

For my friends and family, it’d be fairly annoying to connect to Tailscale, and really annoying to connect to Wireguard or Yggdrasil.

Think of a smart TV used by your mom and having to guide her to install Wireguard on it lol.

I don’t fundamentally distrust Plex’s encryption after having tcpdumped it and seeing nothing but gibberish - which is exactly what my ISPs would see, that’s my reason for encryption. But I do not trust them to keep that feature operational indefinitely.

I’ve actually seen more people commercialise Jellyfin because you can edit the fuck out of its source code and add 10 ads and 3 paywalls. I’ve only seen people selling access to Plex shares directly - like you would sell a Steam key, whereas Jellyfin custom shares get customised and sold as a Netflix alternative with an active subscription in some places around the world.

TL; DR: UX, UI, and memory.

Memory usage is a significant concern. It immediately made my NAS completely crash when attempting to scan the (not even very large) library. Plex, right now, as of writing, when idle, uses 30MB, compared to the 3.1GB reported by Jellyfin when I last tried it, which was the last reading before my NAS died a tragic death of RAM starvation.

The apps are bad. A browser isn’t a good solution - see HDR, 10bit, 5.1, Atmos, and bit-perfect support. Remote access is complex, particularly for those behind CG-NAT, and encryption for remote access is even more convoluted; Plex does it in one checkbox. Some of that is architectural, some financial, but the end result is a worse experience for me.

The UI design is such that any server slowdown affects responsiveness severely, even for simple actions, which unfortunately speaks volumes about how much of a priority the actual user experience is - that’s not something I’m compatible with as a person in general.

Third-party apps are not good either for my platforms, I deemed them to be unusable unstable and amusingly poorly designed - that’s including the Swift and Flutter versions, the latter of which’s design and UX I found incredibly obtuse. Stretching a phone app for desktop use feels a bit like stretching your ballsack into a wind sail - maybe just get a sail mate.

I genuinely wanted to like Jellyfin, I hate proprietary software, let alone paid software, LET ALONE paid piracy software. But JF still has so many areas like these that are just incredibly frustrating to deal with. Plex’s dogshit decisions are not impacting me much (Lifetime), I have established custom setups around the desktop Plex clients to make them usable, so I see no immediate reason to switch until Jellyfin addresses its memory usage and considers using a non-skid language for an application that’s essentially a file server, set of ffmpeg scripts and a metadata database.

Merge conflicts are a concern for KeePass, especially for those that don’t want to resolve them. Sync is difficult. AFAIK this is a very common issue with Syncthing setups.

Also, the portability from Bitwarden to KP leaves a bit to be desired, though that’s probably 90% on BW.

Not to my knowledge. As far as forks go, that’s true. However, Vaultwarden would need to become an independent team, and even if they don’t take over maintaining the client, someone else would need to become independent. While it can work, it can also lead to very nasty, longstanding bugs or security issues due to scale, budget, and effort. I see this a lot with Apple apps for example - smaller developers understandably don’t want to deal with Apple’s crap and costs, and everyone suffers in the end.

If you look at the current state of the cybersecurity world, it’s not kind to open-source developers. AI-generated BS is dredging up vulnerabilities on all sides. So security is also a big concern. Someone like Bitwarden has a lot of budget to swing.

Vaultwarden itself is incredibly good, but not perfect:

~~https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-26012.~~

Edit: Bad example, point is security is a concern with a smaller team.

They also haven’t addressed the removal of inclusion and transparency from their goals.

EDIT: They did. They said it’s “less of a priority”. The article I shared has been updated. I smell corporate bullshit though. “Oversight” this, “priority shift” that, they’d have to work hard to gain any trust back.