It’s been that way for years now, it’s all on their website https://www.plex.tv/plans/

If you want to stream from outside your local network you need to pay. Hardware transcoding is also paywalled now, along with a bunch of other things.

I bought a discounted lifetime Plexpass at least a decade ago. Still, I’m gradually moving over to Jellyfin because Plex has made a ton of business decisions that feel user hostile.

Where I live, it was always free to stream from outside your LAN until July 2025. Maybe that's because I had used it for a long time and was grandfathered in, I don't know.