Why I'm building dubby

Key Takeaways

• Plex’s Lifetime Pass has gone from $120 to $250 to $750 across two price hikes since March 2025, the most recent just this month
• Jellyfin’s Android TV app has accumulated over 200 GitHub issues with “crash” in the title, despite being free and open-source
• dubby keeps hardware transcoding, HDR tone-mapping, and playback free. Paid-tier details are still being worked out

What Happened When I Lost My Job?

Last December, I lost my job, and the open calendar that followed became the reason dubby exists. Losing steady income is rarely a gift, but it created space for a project I’d been putting off for years: fixing a self-hosted media server ecosystem that had been quietly failing its users. Not exactly how I pictured “finally having time for a personal project” starting, but here we are.

I’d been running a Plex server for years, the way a lot of people have. Sharing it with family. Half-forgetting it was even running until something went wrong. What changed my mind wasn’t one bad day. It was watching an entire year of decisions add up.

Who’s Building dubby

Before I get into what’s wrong with Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby, it’s fair to ask who’s saying so. I took my first job as a web developer in 1998, and spent most of the years since as a full-stack and backend engineer, bouncing between startups and bigger companies across a long list of different stacks. More recently, that shifted toward infrastructure and platform engineering: the systems and tooling that keep production actually running.

I’ll also say plainly: I use AI tools, including Claude Code, to help build dubby. I know that’s a loaded statement in this community, and I’d rather you hear it from me than assume it. What it doesn’t mean is that anything ships unreviewed. Architecture decisions, security-sensitive code, anything that touches your data gets the same scrutiny I’d give a junior engineer’s pull request, regardless of who or what wrote the first draft.

None of that guarantees dubby ships bug-free. It does mean the person building it, and reviewing everything that goes into it, has been doing this for the better part of three decades, not two weeks with a tutorial.

Why Does Plex’s Pricing Keep Getting Worse?

In March 2025, Plex moved remote streaming behind a paywall, requiring either a new $1.99/month Remote Watch Pass or an already-owned Plex Pass, whose price jumped in the same announcement: annual from $40 to $70, lifetime from $120 to $250. Then, in July 2026, the lifetime price jumped again: to $750, a 3x increase in a little over a year. That’s not a rumor. That’s the actual pricing page, twice.

A few months later, a UI redesign followed that even Plex’s own forums couldn’t defend. One thread on the new Roku interface ran past 400 replies, most of them some version of “unusable.” Have you ever paid for a product update and immediately regretted it?

And through all of it, I kept seeing the same question resurface in Plex’s support forums, in 2020, 2023, 2024, and again in 2025, from different people, asking almost the exact same thing: “I’m paying for Plex Pass, why am I still seeing ads?” That’s not one annoyed person. That’s a product that’s confusing about what you’re actually paying for.

Is Jellyfin Actually a Good Plex Alternative?

Jellyfin is the free, open-source project born when Emby went closed-source in 2018, and it gets the ethos right: no paywall, no data-selling, nothing to hide. If you’re reading this thinking “sounds like Jellyfin already does what you’re describing,” you’re not wrong to think that. I thought the same thing, and I really wanted it to be the end of the story.

It wasn’t, for three reasons. First, the official apps felt rough in exactly the ways that matter for a media server, and it’s not just me saying it. Reviewers have called the official TV client “rough around the edges,” and one comparison piece put it plainly: it’s “hard not to notice just how much more polished the Plex app feels”. Second, on Apple TV there’s no first-party app at all, just Swiftfin, a community client Jellyfin eventually adopted rather than built in-house. Third, the Android TV app has accumulated over 200 GitHub issues with “crash” in the title.

None of it was bad, exactly. It just felt like the second-class citizen in my living room, every night, and I didn’t want to build a company around a compromise I wasn’t willing to live with myself.

What Went Wrong With Emby?

Emby’s hardware transcoding, the thing that lets a $35 mini PC handle 4K playback without melting, sits behind a Premiere subscription, same as Plex Pass. I’d already ruled it out for that reason alone.

The deeper problem is how Emby got here. The project exists in its current closed-source form because its predecessor disclosed the decision in a bug-report comment instead of an actual announcement. Would you trust a company that announces major changes that way?

None of this is a hypothetical, cherry-picked gripe. It’s the same handful of things thousands of people have been saying for years, about three different products, in three different ways: paywalls that move, interfaces that get worse, free tiers that stop being free the moment you need the feature that matters.

What Makes dubby Different?

None of this was abstract to me. I’d been annoyed at exactly this stuff for a long time. I just hadn’t had the excuse to actually do something about it, until I did.

dubby is what came out of that. The rule I wrote down first, before almost anything else: first-class playback, metadata, and library management stay free, permanently, not a paywalled version of what should already be table stakes. Hardware transcoding, HDR tone-mapping, and trickplay previews, the stuff currently locked behind Plex Pass or Emby Premiere, run free on whatever hardware you’ve actually got.

Is dubby Really Free?

I’m one person doing this, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby still cover ground I don’t, and I’d rather say that upfront than have you find out later, because pretending otherwise would make me exactly the kind of company I started this to get away from.

dubby will have a paid tier eventually. The specifics aren’t locked yet. What’s non-negotiable, regardless of how that shakes out, is that playback, metadata, and library management never get held hostage behind it. That’s the whole bet.

If that’s what you’ve been wanting too, the waitlist is on the homepage. I’ll be writing here as I build. What ships, why, and what I’m still figuring out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is dubby completely free to use?

Playback, metadata, and basic library management are free and always will be. There will be a paid tier for additional features down the line. Exact details are still being worked out.

How is dubby different from Plex?

Plex paywalls playback itself through Plex Pass, gating remote streaming, hardware transcoding, and HDR tone-mapping. dubby keeps those free.

Why not just use Jellyfin if it’s free?

Jellyfin is genuinely free and open-source, but its official apps (particularly on Apple TV and Android TV) have real polish and stability gaps. dubby aims to match Jellyfin’s free-playback philosophy with more finished native apps.

Why isn’t dubby open source?

Maybe someday, but not right now. Staying closed source lets me move fast without coordinating across forks, and it funds the actual work: polished native TV apps, ongoing maintenance, the sustained effort that volunteer projects don’t always have the bandwidth for. There’s also a problem I don’t have a good answer for yet: reviewing a flood of AI-assisted contributions from strangers, at the same scrutiny I hold my own AI-assisted work to, is uncharted territory for open-source maintainers right now, and I’m not confident I could do it responsibly. That’s not the same as “basic functionality might get paywalled later,” though: playback, metadata, and library management stay free regardless of license, and you never need a cloud account just to use your own server. If dubby ever opens up, it’ll be because I’ve figured that part out, not because it sounds good on a roadmap.

When can I try dubby?

dubby is in active development. Join the waitlist on the homepage for early access as features ship.