this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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You grossly overestimate the number of people who are both willing and able to deploy, secure, manage, and maintain this kind of infrastructure. You may not find any value in offloading these responsibilities to a service provider operated by trained professionals, but your outright refusal to acknowledge that other people might is nothing short of callous.
Dude, my "infrastructure" is an old desktop pc with truenas and arr stack + jellyfin apps. I haven't done anything more than update the apps every now and then for over a year. I think you're exaggerating how much effort it actually requires. Not to mention that this is all for a setup that manages requesting, downloading and sorting the media as well.
If you just want to view what you already have, you can simply install jellyfin server in the pc where your videos are, point the libraries to the correct folder and that's it. To use it simply download the app on your device. If you want to get fancy you can install a plugin to use as the subtitle provider. To use outside your house just install tailscale. Doing all of that would take like 2 hours, tops.
Oh and there's nothing to secure if you don't expose it to the internet directly.
If you want to be lazy and pay a subscription, go ahead. I don't think it's worth what they're asking.
Many people who have plex set up struggled to even do that. For them to then have to install multiple applications that don't automatically work with default settings out of the box is asking too much for a not insignificant portion of plex users. Not everyone knows how to do proper self hosting. Not everyone can figure it out.
"They" don't have to do that. They can just install the jellyfin server .exe in their computer and point it to their libraries, that's it. As time goes on they couls slowly start adding plugins or learning how more advanced features work. But hey, if you want to pay a thirs party to access your own media, go ahead. We all make mistakes in life xD