No longer free to stream personal content on Plex

Correct. Notice went out on March 19th.

https://www.plex.tv/blog/important-2025-plex-updates/

also the title used here is misleading.

It's still free to stream, it's not free to remote stream (without other workarounds to make plex think you're watching locally). Remote streaming has used Plex's servers as intermediaries, and with more people using plex than ever before, they can't not charge for that access anymore.

It is included with Plex Pass, so there's no additional fee, although the price of Plex Pass just went up this week (also announced over a month ago).

The workarounds work, and you should have no fear using them, because you're providing the infrastructure to remote watch from anywhere, not plex. For instance, using a VPN to act as if you were on your home network would skip Plex's relay servers entirely, and thus not incur a cost for them.

It’s a recurring cost for them to use their servers. They don’t care if you use a vpn to your home network and then watch that way.

They can’t offer something for free that has an ongoing cost for them that’s not how business works.

Most needed it to benefit from gpu transcode anyway.  Lot of nothing news