That makes sense. I’ve only hosted Plex through a proxy or VPN anyway for networking and security reasons, but it’s pretty shitty to force it just out of greed.

I am also planning to move to JellyFin, but more out of open source fanaticism than financial reasons.

That isn’t how it used to work.

Why would they care what subnet the request is coming from? That’s wack.

Can you give me an example of remote direct access that would be blocked? You can use nginx to forward your public IP to your Plex and it’s fine, you can forward ports directly on your router and connect to your public IP, you can use a VPN to connect from a different network; what are they limiting? It’s the same hurdle you have to overcome with Jellyfin. Relays are convenient, but they also cost money.

You can use ZeroTier to connect from anywhere. It only makes you pay to use the plex router/relay.

If you connect with the IP address it doesn’t charge you. You can use ZeroTier to connect from anywhere.

Right, the $2 is to use the relay service, which costs Plex bandwidth. They can’t just do it free for everyone forever, bandwidth costs money.

The $2/mo is for the Plex relay service. If you access the server directly it should be free.

And if it’s SQLite (which I believe is the default) it’s really just reading and writing a file on the file system.