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Video, audio & media

Infuse

Home video library player with a real lifetime pro unlock

Price: $99.99 once

Lifetime tierA one-time plan of a subscription app

Buy direct

Price read on firecore.com, the page Buy direct opens.

The catch

The free app is deliberately limited — Dolby Vision, lossless audio and cloud sources are Pro

The full picture

This is a subscription product with a lifetime tier attached, not a classic perpetual licence, and the free version is cut down on purpose. "Lifetime" means the lifetime of the product, not a contract with you. It is sold as an in-app unlock rather than a licence key you download, so it most likely travels with the account you buy it with. Infuse plays files, it does not organise or transcode them, so a messy library stays messy unless you tidy it or run a Plex or Jellyfin server behind it.

Pays back in
22 months
Seats
Not stated
Developer account
None needed
Buy once$99.99Rent 5 years$270

$170 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against Emby Premiere at $54 a year, Emby's yearly plan; Emby also sells a $119 lifetime. Also replaces Plex Pass.

What it looks like

Infuse: Infuse's media detail screen (1472x1030) for Mad Men S1 E2: full-bleed artwork backdrop, series logo, runtime/date/TV-14/1080p/DTS-HD MA 5.1 badges, TMDb/Metacritic/Rotten Tomatoes scores, synopsis, the watched / bookmark / favourite / add-to-list / more button row, "Resume 00:01:39" and Trailer buttons, a Season 1 episode strip with thumbnails and a Cast and Crew row below.
Infuse's media detail screen (1472x1030) for Mad Men S1 E2. Vendor site (firecore.com/infuse feature images)
Infuse: Infuse's Add Source / library-settings screen (1472x1030): left column with Browser and USB Cable tiles plus a Locations list (FTP, Documents, Other Apps, Direct URL, Downloads, Files, Saved Shares); right column with Add Local Folder, then Network Shares — Add SMB, Add FTP, Add NFS, Add WebDAV — and Cloud Services — Add Google Drive, Add Dropbox.
Infuse's Add Source / library-settings screen (1472x1030). Vendor site (firecore.com/infuse feature images)
Infuse: Infuse playing Big Buck Bunny (1472x1030) with the transport overlay up: title at the top, and a rounded control bar with volume slider, previous/skip-back/pause/skip-forward/next, settings, PiP, AirPlay, fill-screen and subtitle/track buttons, plus 6:23 elapsed / -4:12 remaining.
Infuse playing Big Buck Bunny (1472x1030) with the transport overlay up. Vendor site (firecore.com/infuse feature images)

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

Infuse is for the drive full of video you already own. Point it at a share or a NAS and it comes back with posters, descriptions, episode ordering and a watched marker, instead of a list of filenames with a release group in them. It decodes a wide spread of formats directly, passes lossless audio through where the hardware allows, and keeps your position in sync between the Mac, the iPhone and the Apple TV, which is the feature people actually stay for.

The pricing is honest about what it is. The app is free and genuinely usable free; Pro is $1.99 a month, $16.99 a year, or $99.99 once. The one-time option is real, not a promotion, and it is the reason this app is listed here at all — but it sits inside a subscription product, so treat "lifetime" as meaning the life of Infuse rather than a promise made to you. Against Emby's yearly plan, the break-even lands somewhere near the two-year mark.

It is not worth $99.99 if the free version already plays your files, which for a lot of people it does. And it is not a server: nothing here transcodes for a weak client or shares your library with a friend. If that is the job, you want Plex or Jellyfin, with Infuse in front of it or not at all.

What owners report

Points that recur across the discussions below. A report of what users say, not our verdict: we don’t review software.

Praised

  • Owners repeatedly point to shared watch state and metadata across Apple TV, Mac and iPhone as the thing that keeps them paying
  • Several owners say it direct-plays 4K and HDR material their Plex clients insist on transcoding
  • Update cadence and the speed of support replies come up repeatedly from different owners

Criticised

  • The price is the recurring argument: several owners call the lifetime unlock hard to justify for a video player, and some say the older per-version licence was better value

Details

The price in full

The base app is free. Infuse Pro is sold at $1.99 a month, $16.99 a year, or $99.99 once for lifetime. Against the yearly plan the lifetime unlock pays for itself in about six years; against monthly, in roughly four.

The Infuse page at firecore.com
The developer’s own page. firecore.com, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
Yes
Works offline
Partly
Apple Silicon
Native
On Setapp
No
Minimum macOS
not stated
App Store rating
4.7 from 28,217 people
Developer
Firecore

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