9 ms·

Changes to Tailscale Pricing and Plans

325 points by bvogelzang 3y ago

rmrf100 3y ago
You guys rocks!
vvladymyrov 3y ago
TLDR from Tailscale announcement email regarding Personal plan: `changes are that the Personal plan is now called Free, and it includes nearly everything that Tailscale has to offer for up to 3 users and 100 devices.`
hjuutilainen 3y ago
I just got an email about this and here’s what they say: > Your plan is unaffected and you can continue to use the Personal Pro plan as you normally do. However, Tailscale's new Free plan includes nearly everything that Tailscale has to offer for up to 3 users on a custom domain and 100 devices. This plan may be more aligned with how you use Tailscale. Go to the Billing page in the admin console to review your options. So I’ve been paying them for a while now but now they’re telling me I could just get the same functionality with the free plan. I really like what this company is doing! Thank you Tailscale, I’ll just keep paying to show my appreciation!
- Xeoncross 3y ago
  That's the way to nickle-and-dime your customers so they're always looking around for an alternative! /s
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  I fully expected the opposite to this. I agree, this is a good way to treat customers (even small ones) and seems to be a rare occurrence!
- thelittleone 3y ago
  Amazing. Was just discussing this with a friend yesterday as a way to build loyalty. I have so many subscriptions I pay for but rarely if ever use (often forgotten). How refreshing it would be to receive an email to the effect "hey we notice your paying but not using product X. Here's some ideas of how you could use it, otherwise consider downgrading to free plan". May be at odds with short term revenue, but I'd then be a brand advocate.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  Irony is that you get less features, according to their pricing feature graph...
  - leodag 3y ago
    They said he should reconsider if the free plan covers his usage, not that he'd get the same features. Which could be true if e.g you were only paying so you could get more than one user.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  I think the point of free plans is that no money changes hands so there's no support or SLA, while base paid plan gets now more expensive. So if you didn't need those, you save money now, but if you do, you have to pay up to get the same features (going from $50/year up to $200+/year if you are just using it alone). So it's not all pure altruism. But I'm not a Tailscale user, this is just from what I see looking from outside.
- is_true 3y ago
  I just got the opposite treatment from another service a couple of days ago. The API endpoints failed silently without an error, and when I logged in on the dashboard it said that my current plan was replaced. They didn't even sent an email.
- noncoml 3y ago
  I’d just keep paying them just for sending this mail. Kudos!
- thefz 3y ago
  Exactly the same for me. Awesome company.
- ignoramous 3y ago
  Love tailscale, but here's a company on the up, bouyed by the renewed impetus all around for zero trust, with its do no evil, free lunch for all, growth mindset. Comparing it with companies that have switched to rent-seeking is ironic, because if history is any indicator, most Day 1 companies of today will Day 2 out, eventually (not to say that being a Day 1 company is in anyway easy).
- wintogreen74 3y ago
  This is what github did a while ago, no? I was paying for some enterprise-y features that they added to the free plan and then stopped billing me. I know there's lots of MS hate here, but this was pretty unique IME
  - nerdyadventurer 3y ago
    source please?
omblivion 3y ago
I really like this change of plans, I use Tailscale daily and this affirms their presence into my tech ecosystem
KMnO4 3y ago
TL;DR - Free plan (previously called personal) now let’s you have up to 3 team members - 100 devices - Monthly paid plan also now includes 3 free users - Additional users are PAYG Very refreshing to see a company give more free stuff after adjusting their plans. Usually you see the opposite.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I'm going to get my son to use the three user plan when he runs a minecraft server and has a friend log in, it's a better answer than screwing around with the NAT, DMZ and all that.
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    Even without this change, if you can get the other folks to use Tailscale you can share out devices. So he doesn't need to manage other users, they can create their own accounts and access his server.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      That's this https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/ https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/ right?
      - Jtsummers 3y ago
        Yes, that's the one.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  TailScale is still small. They probably identified that their pricing plan was preventing them from user acquisition and/or they are having pressure from competition and thus are trying to flood the market to become the de facto solution. It’s a pretty common play for a smaller startup. They just broke the 1B valuation last year. Could be the board pushing the executive team to grow the number of users because happy free tier customers tend to convert to paygo at some non 0% just as paygo customers convert to ENT contracts at some non 0% as personal projects grow into businesses and smaller businesses grow into large ones.
rektide 3y ago
More proof how smart the team is. Getting from a personal 0->1 users product to a 1->many users product is a sharp insight.
manuelabeledo 3y ago
It's refreshing to see a company that doesn't increase prices or cut features off free plans.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
I use the free plan to access a little raspberry, opened the link with a bit of fear... Read the first phrase "The free plan....." :CRY: "....is expanding from one to three" NIIICE don't need any more user but I am happy that it's staying
cooljacob204 3y ago
How does the multiple users work? I don't see an option to invite other users.
- bradfitz 3y ago
  So far, the same way it's always worked: you need to BYODomain and sign in with your domain's configured SSO provider. You can't do, say, 3 gmail users.
  - tailspin2019 3y ago
    I’ve always disliked the enforced SSO approach. However, if you did have 3 Gmail users, it’s possible to share Tailscale access across multiple accounts. So in a small setup you could create an account for each user and then effectively connect their Tailscale networks together (I’m not sure if you can route between Tailscale accounts directly but you can at least share hosts on your account with users on another account, which is how I do it). I do this with a personal and work account to share some limited access between them.
    - mynameisvlad 3y ago
      They also seem to, based on the footnote: > 4 For historical architectural reasons you cannot currently have more than one user on a “personal” tailnet (such as a gmail.com account). You need either your own domain or a GitHub Organization. Sorry. We will fix this, but not today. Meanwhile, don’t forget that you can use Node Sharing to share devices (including Exit Nodes) across individual tailnets.
  - cooljacob204 3y ago
    Ah so not really all that realistic for personal use with multiple users.
carbocation 3y ago
Since everyone has done a nice job of analyzing the pricing changes, I just thought I would mention that from quick visual inspection, it's not obvious that the two growth curves are drawn from meaningfully different distributions.
morley 3y ago
I see a lot of love for Tailscale, but I'm curious what people use Tailscale for? Is it mostly to access services running on an internal network? Do you use it for work or for fun? The use case I can see is streaming from my personal Plex server from anywhere outside my home, but maybe I'm not thinking big enough.
- corobo 3y ago
  Standard VPN stuff really. Set it and forget it. Accessing my NAS and home machine without opening them up to the world mostly. The most specific use aside from "it's my network, wherever" I've got is setting it up with NextDNS for adblocking no matter where I am in the world and regardless of what network I'm on https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns/ https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns/
- numbers 3y ago
  I found Tailscale for a specific reason, having a network where my various services can talk to each other without going thru HTTP for everything, i.e. ssh, scp, direct schemas for DBs. And I use it for screen sharing my mac computers over the internet while traveling.
- xena 3y ago
  Tailscalar here. One of the main things I use Tailscale for is accessing my development box from anywhere in the world. I can't really develop on Windows so I'm used to ssh-ing into a NixOS machine that runs all my compilers. Tailscale makes accessing it so easy that I can just leave hundreds of emacs buffers open in various tmux panes and reconnect back when I want to do development again. I also run some internal services over Tailscale, a lot of my personal projects have tsnet embedded into them so that my Prometheus machine can scrape and monitor them. My husband also uses one of those services daily to monitor some information that I publish there. I also run the development instance of my blog over Tailscale and use Funnel to share it with people to review my writing before it goes live. At work we use it a lot to let people poke around with changes to development instances of websites (like https://tailscale.dev https://tailscale.dev) without having to push them to the cloud and wait for preview deploys. It is _stupidly convenient_. Turns out you can do a lot of things with networks when you don't have firewalls making everything complicated.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Is headscale becoming a bigger threat? Seems like they're trying to offer a better on ramp so folks don't try and self host out of the gate.
- raggi 3y ago
  TL;DR Headscale is great, and we love it. Full details here: https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource/ https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource/
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    > Instead, we hope that by being transparent about our security practices and helping ensure that Headscale remains compatible with Tailscale, you will either use Tailscale, or host Headscale for your own personal needs. You love Headscale for personal use? What would you say to someone looking at Headscale for their business over Tailscale?
    - raggi 3y ago
      Rock on!
      - candiddevmike 3y ago
        > Rock on! That's a really odd response, to be honest. I was expecting something around features you only get with Tailscale, scaling issues with Headscale, something to sell me on paying $6 a user.
        depr 3y ago
        Are you looking to become a customer?
        ckwalsh 3y ago
        The value of paying Tailscale is - You don't have to maintain the infra yourself. It is maintained by system experts, vs the necessity to learn such knowledge yourself - You are going to get features earlier, as Tailscale is the leading implementation, and Headscale is trying to maintain compatibility - You have a promise of a certain level of support depending on your plan, rather than relying on an open source community with no responsibility to provide support It feels like Tailscale isn't trying to gatekeep the technology, they are trying to sell all the things that simplify/provide value for people who would like to use the technology.
andrewguenther 3y ago
No more limits on subnet routers is huge! Amazing!!
- sccxy 3y ago
  Raspberry Pi to parents house and IT support is much easier now :)
ShakataGaNai 3y ago
This is a really intelligent move on tailscales part. Yes, there are a few hobbyists who paid for the personal pro plan, I'm sure. But at $50 a year it's not exactly going to change the companies economics a lot. Then the next step was jumping into "Team" level which would actually be a major step down for a small hobbyist who wanted a lot of devices (Personal was 20 devices, Personal Pro was 100 devices, Team was 5x the use count. So 2 users... 10 devices). Realistically hobbyists are not going to be the bread-and-butter of Tailscale's business, so why not let them go crazy. Looking at https://tailscale.com/pricing/ https://tailscale.com/pricing/ one of the other major changes that has been made, is the free plan now provides access to almost every feature. Going up to the $6/mo/use "Starter" plan actually loses you some features. So if you've had a taste of the good life, and want to keep it, but have more than three users… You are going to need to go to the premium or enterprise plans. Probably makes their sales process, super easy, since they don't need to give out trials to companies anymore, "free plan for a few users and try it out".
- codethief 3y ago
  > Realistically hobbyists are not going to be the bread-and-butter of Tailscale's business, so why not let them go crazy …and do the marketing for you. (Every other sysadmin is probably a hobbyist.)
pja 3y ago
> For historical architectural reasons you cannot currently have more than one user on a “personal” tailnet (such as a gmail.com account). You need either your own domain or a GitHub Organization. Sorry. We will fix this, but not today. Meanwhile, don’t forget that you can use Node Sharing to share devices (including Exit Nodes) across individual tailnets. Darn. Looks like I may have to create another tailscale account! I do wonder whether this restriction will severely limit the number of 3-person free accounts that are created though - I have my own domain, but that probably puts me in a small minority of people, even the kind of nerds who are willing to try out tailscale in their own time? Which in turn might put something of a crimp on the hoped for flow of viral “my friend put me on their tailnet & I discovered how easy it was” signups. I have been recommending tailscale to absolutely everyone though, so I guess free services work as a marketing tool!?
gilbertbw 3y ago
I'm a big Tailscale proponent, implementing it at work in early 2020. But for us I'm not sure this is great news. We have a small Tailnet of 5 users, paying $30 for the Team plan. If we went for Starter we'd save $18, but loose a lot of cool things Tailscale has come out with recently that we have been looking at, like user/group level ACLs, ACL Gitops,Tailscale SSH and Tailscale Funnel. Alternatively we'd pay $36 for (3 free, 2 * $18) for Premium, which doesn't sound too bad. But the cost for each new user would be three times higher than it currently is (and Tailscale our most expensive SAAS product per person). Or we stick to legacy pricing for now, and live with things like the Subnet Router limit which makes e.g. connecting home VoIP phones to the Tailnet price prohibitive.
- christop 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I'm kinda confused about things like SSH and Funnel being moved to the Premium tier. It feels a little odd that the Free tier lets you use Premium features indefinitely, but as soon as you get more colleagues onboard, you lose those features. Unless you're looking carefully at the pricing page, you'd miss that Starter has many fewer features compared to Free.
- oritsnile 3y ago
  I'm in the same boat, ssh is our most used feature, also quite an odd decision to give the free plan more features than the Starter.
  - mostcallmeyt 3y ago
    Yeah, I thought the webpage was broken when I saw it! :D I can understand that things like SSH and Funnel cost more, since they actually interact with their server infrastructure… but the removal of features and ACLs from Starter wasn't well communicated.
- subarctic 3y ago
  So they used to have a $6/month/user plan that included Funnel and SSH, but now they moved those to the $18/month/user plan? That doesn't sound great, and it's disappointing that that's not even mentioned in the article
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
What... Benefit does tailscale offer over zerotier? 1. It doesn't have accounts so you have to use gmail or Microsoft sso and risk being fucked that way.
- andrew-d 3y ago
  As of about a month ago, you can also sign up to Tailscale with any OIDC-compatible identity provider, so if you don't want to use Gmail or Microsoft you can self-host your own! https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc/ https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc/
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Seriously, if you use one of their recommended identity providers and their "AI" bans you, can you change your access controls on tailscale to another provider? Ideally without physical access to the other machines. The list of identity providers is just ginormous companies that are likely to automatically ban accounts.
george88b 3y ago
I am not sure why Tailscale is always on Hackernews. For example, Twingate allows 5 free users and supports more complex use case without requiring a subnet router. They generally have stronger enterprise features as well.
- brendan-s 3y ago
  Twingate definitely supports complex enterprise use cases for sure but I'll say that somehow it manages to remain super simple to deploy, configure and maintain. I've even got my family on it (let's just say they aren't exactly the most technical folks ever..) so they can access our family photos and other stuff I host at my house (they all live abroad).
- KMnO4 3y ago
  Tailscale is really a winner for simple use cases. For example, these are the steps to access my home server from anywhere in the world with my phone: 1. docker run tailscale/tailscale 2. Use the link provided to login and link my server 3. Download the Tailscale app 4. Login And if you're using a server OS like Unraid, you don't even need to do the first step; just install it through the GUI. It's widely available and accessible.
- jarym 3y ago
  TailScale is the HN darling - open source and great for stitching together computers across networks. Most organisations though are looking at the NetSkope/ZScaler/Perimeter81s of the world and that's where Twingate seems to be picking up the business. It goes beyond the connectivity and has things like non-intrusive device controls which are essential for a lot of places that are in fin tech or have to do SOC2, etc.
wpietri 3y ago
This part is amazing: > we’ll bill you retrospectively each month for the number of users who actively used Tailscale [...] More importantly, it aligns our incentives. [..] With this change, we don’t get paid for a user in your tailnet until that user is getting value from Tailscale. That means it’s not just our job to sell seats, but to help you succeed. Trust is one of the most valuable things in a brand seeking long-term relationships. But so many brands optimize for short-term metrics in ways that damage trust. E.g., places that make it much harder to close an account than open one. (NYT, GFY.) One I really dislike is subscription-based businesses that care more about getting signups than delivering value. It has made me deeply suspicious of joining anything with a subscription model. [1] So I'm very glad to see Tailscale, whose product is great, taking such a thoughtful approach here. I think it's especially important for them, as trust is deeply necessary for them to succeed. I hope some other people learn lessons! E.g., I'd sign up for more streaming subscriptions if I were sure they'd not bill me a month where I didn't watch anything. [1] And I'm apparently not the only one: https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-are-sick-and-tired-of-all-their-subscriptions-cbee7e03 https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-are-sick-and-tired-of-al...
more_corn 3y ago
This is how you do it. Tailscale is amazing and just got more so. Everyone will end up using it personally and it’ll be natural to deploy it for business as well.
amluto 3y ago
I would love to see expanded personal options. The new free tier with 3 users is great, but trying to Tailscale for personal use for a family of more than three users while still using advanced features like Funnel is $18/user/mo, which is too high for personal/family use. If anyone from Tailscale is around, would you consider a family or advanced personal tier for primarily non-commercial use, perhaps a moderate user limit, but more advanced features and lower pricing than Starter?
tomjen3 3y ago
I don't know if it was intentional, but when I saw the headline I assume they were axing the free tier or at least making it significantly less useful. They were in fact doing the opposite.
th0ma5 3y ago
I use Wireguard and love it, but do we risk good features not becoming just as open and able to be self hosted with services like this?
wg0 3y ago
Tailscale is doing to Wire guard what Git hub did to git. Even further mainstreamed it.
codethief 3y ago
I've been looking into using Tailscale/Headscale but I've been struggling[0] to find in-depth information about what security risk the coordination server poses (should it get hacked). Yes, the node list can be locked but the ACL cannot(?) So if I, say, run the Headscale coordination server on one of the devices that are part of my Tailnet, wouldn't an attacker that controls the coordination server automatically get access to my entire Tailnet, including SSH access to every device? So is the conclusion - Always lock your node list, whether you use Tailscale or Headscale. - If you use Headscale, run the coordination server entirely separately from your Tailnet. ? [0]: https://forum.tailscale.com/t/tailscale-security-what-if-the-coordination-server-goes-rogue/5015 https://forum.tailscale.com/t/tailscale-security-what-if-the... )
- sconi 3y ago
  Curious why you want to run Headscale? Is it purely to avoid the risks of the coordination server?
  - codethief 3y ago
    Yes, and because Tailscale requires me to use a third-party identity provider.
    - sconi 3y ago
      Got it. Makes sense. A big part of why we're building Bowtie. https://bowtie.works https://bowtie.works . We stay out of the critical path.
    - andrew-d 3y ago
      As of about a month ago, you can self-host your own OIDC identity provider; for example, Ory Hydra is open-source. https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc/ https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc/
      - codethief 3y ago
        Thanks, I did read that blog post but adding yet another dependency to my stack just for authentication of a single user (me)? I don't know… Then I might as well just install Headscale.
ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
Why can I not zoom into these graphs on mobile?
mlangenberg 3y ago
What hardware would be recommended for a Tailscale subnet router between two sites with a GBit link? Saturating a full-duplex GBit link would require two LAN ports, ruling out the option of a raspberry pi, wouldn’t it?
ospider 3y ago
Tailscale lacks of very basic features. Can you believe that you can not upgrade your plan? That's the worst SaaS product I have ever used.

325 points by bvogelzang 3y ago

You guys rocks!

TLDR from Tailscale announcement email regarding Personal plan: `changes are that the Personal plan is now called Free, and it includes nearly everything that Tailscale has to offer for up to 3 users and 100 devices.`

hjuutilainen 3y ago

I just got an email about this and here’s what they say: > Your plan is unaffected and you can continue to use the Personal Pro plan as you normally do. However, Tailscale's new Free plan includes nearly everything that Tailscale has to offer for up to 3 users on a custom domain and 100 devices. This plan may be more aligned with how you use Tailscale. Go to the Billing page in the admin console to review your options. So I’ve been paying them for a while now but now they’re telling me I could just get the same functionality with the free plan. I really like what this company is doing! Thank you Tailscale, I’ll just keep paying to show my appreciation!

Xeoncross 3y ago
That's the way to nickle-and-dime your customers so they're always looking around for an alternative! /s
tailspin2019 3y ago
I fully expected the opposite to this. I agree, this is a good way to treat customers (even small ones) and seems to be a rare occurrence!
thelittleone 3y ago
Amazing. Was just discussing this with a friend yesterday as a way to build loyalty. I have so many subscriptions I pay for but rarely if ever use (often forgotten). How refreshing it would be to receive an email to the effect "hey we notice your paying but not using product X. Here's some ideas of how you could use it, otherwise consider downgrading to free plan". May be at odds with short term revenue, but I'd then be a brand advocate.
JAlexoid 3y ago
Irony is that you get less features, according to their pricing feature graph...
- leodag 3y ago
  They said he should reconsider if the free plan covers his usage, not that he'd get the same features. Which could be true if e.g you were only paying so you could get more than one user.
throwaway290 3y ago
I think the point of free plans is that no money changes hands so there's no support or SLA, while base paid plan gets now more expensive. So if you didn't need those, you save money now, but if you do, you have to pay up to get the same features (going from $50/year up to $200+/year if you are just using it alone). So it's not all pure altruism. But I'm not a Tailscale user, this is just from what I see looking from outside.
is_true 3y ago
I just got the opposite treatment from another service a couple of days ago. The API endpoints failed silently without an error, and when I logged in on the dashboard it said that my current plan was replaced. They didn't even sent an email.
noncoml 3y ago
I’d just keep paying them just for sending this mail. Kudos!
thefz 3y ago
Exactly the same for me. Awesome company.
ignoramous 3y ago
Love tailscale, but here's a company on the up, bouyed by the renewed impetus all around for zero trust, with its do no evil, free lunch for all, growth mindset. Comparing it with companies that have switched to rent-seeking is ironic, because if history is any indicator, most Day 1 companies of today will Day 2 out, eventually (not to say that being a Day 1 company is in anyway easy).
wintogreen74 3y ago
This is what github did a while ago, no? I was paying for some enterprise-y features that they added to the free plan and then stopped billing me. I know there's lots of MS hate here, but this was pretty unique IME
- nerdyadventurer 3y ago
  source please?

omblivion 3y ago

I really like this change of plans, I use Tailscale daily and this affirms their presence into my tech ecosystem

KMnO4 3y ago

TL;DR - Free plan (previously called personal) now let’s you have up to 3 team members - 100 devices - Monthly paid plan also now includes 3 free users - Additional users are PAYG Very refreshing to see a company give more free stuff after adjusting their plans. Usually you see the opposite.

PaulHoule 3y ago
I'm going to get my son to use the three user plan when he runs a minecraft server and has a friend log in, it's a better answer than screwing around with the NAT, DMZ and all that.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  Even without this change, if you can get the other folks to use Tailscale you can share out devices. So he doesn't need to manage other users, they can create their own accounts and access his server.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    That's this https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/ https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/ right?
    - Jtsummers 3y ago
      Yes, that's the one.
vlovich123 3y ago
TailScale is still small. They probably identified that their pricing plan was preventing them from user acquisition and/or they are having pressure from competition and thus are trying to flood the market to become the de facto solution. It’s a pretty common play for a smaller startup. They just broke the 1B valuation last year. Could be the board pushing the executive team to grow the number of users because happy free tier customers tend to convert to paygo at some non 0% just as paygo customers convert to ENT contracts at some non 0% as personal projects grow into businesses and smaller businesses grow into large ones.

rektide 3y ago

More proof how smart the team is. Getting from a personal 0->1 users product to a 1->many users product is a sharp insight.

manuelabeledo 3y ago

It's refreshing to see a company that doesn't increase prices or cut features off free plans.

lnxg33k1 3y ago

I use the free plan to access a little raspberry, opened the link with a bit of fear... Read the first phrase "The free plan....." :CRY: "....is expanding from one to three" NIIICE don't need any more user but I am happy that it's staying

cooljacob204 3y ago

How does the multiple users work? I don't see an option to invite other users.

bradfitz 3y ago
So far, the same way it's always worked: you need to BYODomain and sign in with your domain's configured SSO provider. You can't do, say, 3 gmail users.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  I’ve always disliked the enforced SSO approach. However, if you did have 3 Gmail users, it’s possible to share Tailscale access across multiple accounts. So in a small setup you could create an account for each user and then effectively connect their Tailscale networks together (I’m not sure if you can route between Tailscale accounts directly but you can at least share hosts on your account with users on another account, which is how I do it). I do this with a personal and work account to share some limited access between them.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    They also seem to, based on the footnote: > 4 For historical architectural reasons you cannot currently have more than one user on a “personal” tailnet (such as a gmail.com account). You need either your own domain or a GitHub Organization. Sorry. We will fix this, but not today. Meanwhile, don’t forget that you can use Node Sharing to share devices (including Exit Nodes) across individual tailnets.
- cooljacob204 3y ago
  Ah so not really all that realistic for personal use with multiple users.

carbocation 3y ago

Since everyone has done a nice job of analyzing the pricing changes, I just thought I would mention that from quick visual inspection, it's not obvious that the two growth curves are drawn from meaningfully different distributions.

morley 3y ago

I see a lot of love for Tailscale, but I'm curious what people use Tailscale for? Is it mostly to access services running on an internal network? Do you use it for work or for fun? The use case I can see is streaming from my personal Plex server from anywhere outside my home, but maybe I'm not thinking big enough.

corobo 3y ago
Standard VPN stuff really. Set it and forget it. Accessing my NAS and home machine without opening them up to the world mostly. The most specific use aside from "it's my network, wherever" I've got is setting it up with NextDNS for adblocking no matter where I am in the world and regardless of what network I'm on https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns/ https://tailscale.com/kb/1218/nextdns/
numbers 3y ago
I found Tailscale for a specific reason, having a network where my various services can talk to each other without going thru HTTP for everything, i.e. ssh, scp, direct schemas for DBs. And I use it for screen sharing my mac computers over the internet while traveling.
xena 3y ago
Tailscalar here. One of the main things I use Tailscale for is accessing my development box from anywhere in the world. I can't really develop on Windows so I'm used to ssh-ing into a NixOS machine that runs all my compilers. Tailscale makes accessing it so easy that I can just leave hundreds of emacs buffers open in various tmux panes and reconnect back when I want to do development again. I also run some internal services over Tailscale, a lot of my personal projects have tsnet embedded into them so that my Prometheus machine can scrape and monitor them. My husband also uses one of those services daily to monitor some information that I publish there. I also run the development instance of my blog over Tailscale and use Funnel to share it with people to review my writing before it goes live. At work we use it a lot to let people poke around with changes to development instances of websites (like https://tailscale.dev https://tailscale.dev) without having to push them to the cloud and wait for preview deploys. It is _stupidly convenient_. Turns out you can do a lot of things with networks when you don't have firewalls making everything complicated.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Is headscale becoming a bigger threat? Seems like they're trying to offer a better on ramp so folks don't try and self host out of the gate.

raggi 3y ago
TL;DR Headscale is great, and we love it. Full details here: https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource/ https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource/
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  > Instead, we hope that by being transparent about our security practices and helping ensure that Headscale remains compatible with Tailscale, you will either use Tailscale, or host Headscale for your own personal needs. You love Headscale for personal use? What would you say to someone looking at Headscale for their business over Tailscale?
  - raggi 3y ago
    Rock on!
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      > Rock on! That's a really odd response, to be honest. I was expecting something around features you only get with Tailscale, scaling issues with Headscale, something to sell me on paying $6 a user.
      - depr 3y ago
        Are you looking to become a customer?
      - ckwalsh 3y ago
        The value of paying Tailscale is - You don't have to maintain the infra yourself. It is maintained by system experts, vs the necessity to learn such knowledge yourself - You are going to get features earlier, as Tailscale is the leading implementation, and Headscale is trying to maintain compatibility - You have a promise of a certain level of support depending on your plan, rather than relying on an open source community with no responsibility to provide support It feels like Tailscale isn't trying to gatekeep the technology, they are trying to sell all the things that simplify/provide value for people who would like to use the technology.

andrewguenther 3y ago

No more limits on subnet routers is huge! Amazing!!

sccxy 3y ago
Raspberry Pi to parents house and IT support is much easier now :)

ShakataGaNai 3y ago

This is a really intelligent move on tailscales part. Yes, there are a few hobbyists who paid for the personal pro plan, I'm sure. But at $50 a year it's not exactly going to change the companies economics a lot. Then the next step was jumping into "Team" level which would actually be a major step down for a small hobbyist who wanted a lot of devices (Personal was 20 devices, Personal Pro was 100 devices, Team was 5x the use count. So 2 users... 10 devices). Realistically hobbyists are not going to be the bread-and-butter of Tailscale's business, so why not let them go crazy. Looking at https://tailscale.com/pricing/ https://tailscale.com/pricing/ one of the other major changes that has been made, is the free plan now provides access to almost every feature. Going up to the $6/mo/use "Starter" plan actually loses you some features. So if you've had a taste of the good life, and want to keep it, but have more than three users… You are going to need to go to the premium or enterprise plans. Probably makes their sales process, super easy, since they don't need to give out trials to companies anymore, "free plan for a few users and try it out".

codethief 3y ago
> Realistically hobbyists are not going to be the bread-and-butter of Tailscale's business, so why not let them go crazy …and do the marketing for you. (Every other sysadmin is probably a hobbyist.)

pja 3y ago

> For historical architectural reasons you cannot currently have more than one user on a “personal” tailnet (such as a gmail.com account). You need either your own domain or a GitHub Organization. Sorry. We will fix this, but not today. Meanwhile, don’t forget that you can use Node Sharing to share devices (including Exit Nodes) across individual tailnets. Darn. Looks like I may have to create another tailscale account! I do wonder whether this restriction will severely limit the number of 3-person free accounts that are created though - I have my own domain, but that probably puts me in a small minority of people, even the kind of nerds who are willing to try out tailscale in their own time? Which in turn might put something of a crimp on the hoped for flow of viral “my friend put me on their tailnet & I discovered how easy it was” signups. I have been recommending tailscale to absolutely everyone though, so I guess free services work as a marketing tool!?

gilbertbw 3y ago

I'm a big Tailscale proponent, implementing it at work in early 2020. But for us I'm not sure this is great news. We have a small Tailnet of 5 users, paying $30 for the Team plan. If we went for Starter we'd save $18, but loose a lot of cool things Tailscale has come out with recently that we have been looking at, like user/group level ACLs, ACL Gitops,Tailscale SSH and Tailscale Funnel. Alternatively we'd pay $36 for (3 free, 2 * $18) for Premium, which doesn't sound too bad. But the cost for each new user would be three times higher than it currently is (and Tailscale our most expensive SAAS product per person). Or we stick to legacy pricing for now, and live with things like the Subnet Router limit which makes e.g. connecting home VoIP phones to the Tailnet price prohibitive.

christop 3y ago
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I'm kinda confused about things like SSH and Funnel being moved to the Premium tier. It feels a little odd that the Free tier lets you use Premium features indefinitely, but as soon as you get more colleagues onboard, you lose those features. Unless you're looking carefully at the pricing page, you'd miss that Starter has many fewer features compared to Free.
oritsnile 3y ago
I'm in the same boat, ssh is our most used feature, also quite an odd decision to give the free plan more features than the Starter.
- mostcallmeyt 3y ago
  Yeah, I thought the webpage was broken when I saw it! :D I can understand that things like SSH and Funnel cost more, since they actually interact with their server infrastructure… but the removal of features and ACLs from Starter wasn't well communicated.
subarctic 3y ago
So they used to have a $6/month/user plan that included Funnel and SSH, but now they moved those to the $18/month/user plan? That doesn't sound great, and it's disappointing that that's not even mentioned in the article

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

What... Benefit does tailscale offer over zerotier? 1. It doesn't have accounts so you have to use gmail or Microsoft sso and risk being fucked that way.

andrew-d 3y ago
As of about a month ago, you can also sign up to Tailscale with any OIDC-compatible identity provider, so if you don't want to use Gmail or Microsoft you can self-host your own! https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc/ https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc/
- nottorp 3y ago
  Seriously, if you use one of their recommended identity providers and their "AI" bans you, can you change your access controls on tailscale to another provider? Ideally without physical access to the other machines. The list of identity providers is just ginormous companies that are likely to automatically ban accounts.

george88b 3y ago

I am not sure why Tailscale is always on Hackernews. For example, Twingate allows 5 free users and supports more complex use case without requiring a subnet router. They generally have stronger enterprise features as well.

brendan-s 3y ago
Twingate definitely supports complex enterprise use cases for sure but I'll say that somehow it manages to remain super simple to deploy, configure and maintain. I've even got my family on it (let's just say they aren't exactly the most technical folks ever..) so they can access our family photos and other stuff I host at my house (they all live abroad).
KMnO4 3y ago
Tailscale is really a winner for simple use cases. For example, these are the steps to access my home server from anywhere in the world with my phone: 1. docker run tailscale/tailscale 2. Use the link provided to login and link my server 3. Download the Tailscale app 4. Login And if you're using a server OS like Unraid, you don't even need to do the first step; just install it through the GUI. It's widely available and accessible.
jarym 3y ago
TailScale is the HN darling - open source and great for stitching together computers across networks. Most organisations though are looking at the NetSkope/ZScaler/Perimeter81s of the world and that's where Twingate seems to be picking up the business. It goes beyond the connectivity and has things like non-intrusive device controls which are essential for a lot of places that are in fin tech or have to do SOC2, etc.

wpietri 3y ago

This part is amazing: > we’ll bill you retrospectively each month for the number of users who actively used Tailscale [...] More importantly, it aligns our incentives. [..] With this change, we don’t get paid for a user in your tailnet until that user is getting value from Tailscale. That means it’s not just our job to sell seats, but to help you succeed. Trust is one of the most valuable things in a brand seeking long-term relationships. But so many brands optimize for short-term metrics in ways that damage trust. E.g., places that make it much harder to close an account than open one. (NYT, GFY.) One I really dislike is subscription-based businesses that care more about getting signups than delivering value. It has made me deeply suspicious of joining anything with a subscription model. [1] So I'm very glad to see Tailscale, whose product is great, taking such a thoughtful approach here. I think it's especially important for them, as trust is deeply necessary for them to succeed. I hope some other people learn lessons! E.g., I'd sign up for more streaming subscriptions if I were sure they'd not bill me a month where I didn't watch anything. [1] And I'm apparently not the only one: https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-are-sick-and-tired-of-all-their-subscriptions-cbee7e03 https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-are-sick-and-tired-of-al...

more_corn 3y ago

This is how you do it. Tailscale is amazing and just got more so. Everyone will end up using it personally and it’ll be natural to deploy it for business as well.

amluto 3y ago

I would love to see expanded personal options. The new free tier with 3 users is great, but trying to Tailscale for personal use for a family of more than three users while still using advanced features like Funnel is $18/user/mo, which is too high for personal/family use. If anyone from Tailscale is around, would you consider a family or advanced personal tier for primarily non-commercial use, perhaps a moderate user limit, but more advanced features and lower pricing than Starter?

tomjen3 3y ago

I don't know if it was intentional, but when I saw the headline I assume they were axing the free tier or at least making it significantly less useful. They were in fact doing the opposite.

th0ma5 3y ago

I use Wireguard and love it, but do we risk good features not becoming just as open and able to be self hosted with services like this?

wg0 3y ago

Tailscale is doing to Wire guard what Git hub did to git. Even further mainstreamed it.

codethief 3y ago

I've been looking into using Tailscale/Headscale but I've been struggling[0] to find in-depth information about what security risk the coordination server poses (should it get hacked). Yes, the node list can be locked but the ACL cannot(?) So if I, say, run the Headscale coordination server on one of the devices that are part of my Tailnet, wouldn't an attacker that controls the coordination server automatically get access to my entire Tailnet, including SSH access to every device? So is the conclusion - Always lock your node list, whether you use Tailscale or Headscale. - If you use Headscale, run the coordination server entirely separately from your Tailnet. ? [0]: https://forum.tailscale.com/t/tailscale-security-what-if-the-coordination-server-goes-rogue/5015 https://forum.tailscale.com/t/tailscale-security-what-if-the... )

sconi 3y ago
Curious why you want to run Headscale? Is it purely to avoid the risks of the coordination server?
- codethief 3y ago
  Yes, and because Tailscale requires me to use a third-party identity provider.
  - sconi 3y ago
    Got it. Makes sense. A big part of why we're building Bowtie. https://bowtie.works https://bowtie.works . We stay out of the critical path.
  - andrew-d 3y ago
    As of about a month ago, you can self-host your own OIDC identity provider; for example, Ory Hydra is open-source. https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc/ https://tailscale.com/blog/custom-oidc/
    - codethief 3y ago
      Thanks, I did read that blog post but adding yet another dependency to my stack just for authentication of a single user (me)? I don't know… Then I might as well just install Headscale.

ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago

Why can I not zoom into these graphs on mobile?

mlangenberg 3y ago

What hardware would be recommended for a Tailscale subnet router between two sites with a GBit link? Saturating a full-duplex GBit link would require two LAN ports, ruling out the option of a raspberry pi, wouldn’t it?

ospider 3y ago

Tailscale lacks of very basic features. Can you believe that you can not upgrade your plan? That's the worst SaaS product I have ever used.