> But suddenly one day your free mobile viewer app updates and requires payment to stream your own mp4 files

I have a plex server that a dozen of my friends and family use and none of them have to pay a cent to access it.

Then after thinking about it a bit longer, I remembered that plex was making some kind of distinction about "members of a household", apparently called Plex Home [1].

I'm not sure what benefits you get from using it, since I haven't bothered trying to see what it needs to work.

Long story short, however, is if you just have your family members sign up for their own plex account, then add them to your plex server as a separate user, things will continue to Just Work and do so for free.

I would just prefer to not have to public expose a service for a single user. In my case when sharing an image server to family it has been easy enough to walk them through installing tailscale on their windows desktop that they use. I love adding friends and fam to my tailnet. It then also makes it easier to log in and troubleshoot their issues later too.

It looks like CFs solution for restricted public access is CF access controll, but thats still publicly exposed. Their non-public option is WARP, but that requires installation on the client machine. At that point your user setup is even harder then tailscale.