Yes. You only need to pay if you’re connecting via their relay or trying to use the remote hosting functionality. But since a VPN would land you inside of the network, you’d be fine. You’d probably need to dig into the plex settings to specify that the VPN subnet is LAN traffic. But after that, you should be good.
I mean, you just listed the most insecure way to host Jellyfin. Poking a hole in your firewall will technically work, but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct way to do things. A good setup would use a reverse proxy, and some sort of authentication wall like Authentik or Authelia.
All of that would only take about 15 minutes for someone who knows what they’re doing. But the vast majority of people setting up Jellyfin for the first time won’t know what they’re doing. And seeing the inevitable “lol just open your firewall” comments only serves to scare them away, because even the noobs have heads that’s the wrong way to do things.
Yeah, “we’ve spared no expense” is a dramatically ironic line in the book, because the reader sees Hammond cutting costs at every single opportunity. Every single time Hammond drops that line, it’s almost immediately preceded or followed by an example of him cutting corners to save money.
Book Hammond is sort of a cross between Trump and Musk. He takes all of the worst techbro “I want to sound smart by telling people I’m an engineer, but I’m actually an idiot with zero engineering education. But I hold the purse strings so I can tell the engineers how to do their jobs” aspects of Musk, and combines it with Trump’s infamous “do it my way (as cheaply as possible; we won’t even pay a lot of the people who worked on it) or you’re fired” business attitude. The man is a bully who threatens to ruin anyone that doesn’t go along with him.
Nedry was a good example of that. Nedry had to bid on the contract basically blind, because they wouldn’t tell him anything about the project until after he won the contract and signed an NDA. They just told him it was a basic database management program, so he bid the job as such. All of the park automation stuff was revealed after he won the contract. And Hammond basically pulled a Vader “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further.”