[mbirth]

> It relies on their hosted services/infrastructure.

Only if you want it to. Your local Plex server is always available on port 32400 - which can be opened up for others as well. But using Plex’s authentication is more convenient, of course.

[doix]

Yeah, I was specifically talking about the "firewall" bypassing the parent mentioned (most likely combined with NAT punch-through as well). You could of course use Plex without that and use wireguard (or just make it available to the internet) and not rely on their infra.