I whitelist my friends IP blocks, seems to work well enough.

No way in hell I'm convincing them to install tailscale or similar on their TV / router.

How's the bandwidth and transfer limits on that $5 VPS, would be my next concern? One approximately-perfect-Bluray-quality 4K movie can be north of 50GB, decent quality, still 20+GB. Very-high-quality 1080p is gonna be like 8-12GB for a movie, OK quality, 4.5-6GB.

Only for outgoing - 2TB included, each additional TB is $1. It was 20TB included when I set this up in 2024, but they've since changed their policies.

If I used their (Hetzner) servers in the EU it's still be 20TB, but I prefer having the server 10 miles from my house.

Plenty fine with that pricing since I also use it to un-CGNAT services on my home server (I'd run this through Tunnels if it was significant)

Generally ~22GB 4k hdr muxes or ~8gb 1080p.

Damn, that's decent, yeah that'd get you a ways. Imma stick with free peer-to-peer VPN via Tailscale because it's already working for me, but I can see the appeal of that.

There was just another one recently actually. It was the final straw that convinced me to stop making my Jellyfin server publicly accessible (for my family abroad) and move to a VPN based solution instead (WireGuard or Tailscale I haven’t set it up yet).