[HN Gopher] Changes to Tailscale Pricing and Plans
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Changes to Tailscale Pricing and Plans
        
       Author : bvogelzang
       Score  : 283 points
       Date   : 2023-04-18 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tailscale.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tailscale.com)
        
       | pja wrote:
       | > _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!?
        
       | morley wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | KMnO4 wrote:
         | Plex provides remote access without needing any additional
         | services. Just enable it in the settings and you can access
         | your library anywhere when you log in to plex.tv.
        
           | sleepybrett wrote:
           | it sure does, and i'm not sure it's great. Didn't the
           | bitwarden hack happen via a plex server on an engineers
           | network?
        
         | acjacobson wrote:
         | I have a NAS in my home, and my parents have a NAS in theirs.
         | Everything is on Tailscale and I can SSH into either machine
         | whenever I need. I've needed to do this a few times when I am
         | on the road, but more commonly when I use Tailscale when I do a
         | little remote tech support for my parents.
         | 
         | It took minutes to set up - dead easy.
        
         | corobo wrote:
         | 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/
        
         | piger wrote:
         | I don't have space for servers at home, so I use Tailscale to
         | expand my home lab with a couple of VPS; the nice thing is that
         | I can just block all ingress traffic in my provider's control
         | panel (Hetzner in my case) and just use these machines as they
         | were part of my LAN, and I don't have to worry about things
         | like Docker exposing stuff to the public internet
        
         | numbers wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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) 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.
        
           | xeonmc wrote:
           | Speaking of Funnel, a holy grail use case is to be able to
           | host one-off game sessions to an untrusted stranger who do
           | would not trust this "Tell-scale thing" you require him to
           | install or register an account for. Most frequently these
           | kinds of spontaneous interaction happens over Discord, where
           | perhaps you want to quickly show someone what you're building
           | in Minecraft and have him make some suggestions in-game or
           | something. Is there any possibility that Tailscale can
           | improve on reducing friction for some of these more "social"
           | use cases where the target demographic is not tech-savvy and
           | distrustful?
        
           | xena wrote:
           | Now that I think about it, there's also some other things I
           | use it for. I embedded the Tailscale API into my VM manager
           | waifud (https://github.com/Xe/waifud) so that I can pass a
           | `--join-tailnet` flag to `waifuctl create` and plunk new
           | virtual machines onto my tailnet with Tailscale SSH enabled.
           | It makes testing things on arbitrary versions of Ubuntu so
           | easy that it feels like I'm cheating.
           | 
           | My hypervisors are also subnet routers so my VMs can connect
           | to eachother like they're on the same network. All the fun of
           | static routing without any of the "fun" of static routing!
           | 
           | There is so much more you can use it for though: -
           | https://tailscale.dev/blog/funnel-101 -
           | https://tailscale.com/blog/tsnet-virtual-private-services/ -
           | https://tailscale.com/kb/1137/minecraft/
           | 
           | The cloud's the limit!
        
         | arrosenberg wrote:
         | You can also extend your RaspberryPi over Tailscale and have
         | your phone use it on the go.
        
         | ASinclair wrote:
         | You can setup an exit node on your home network where you run a
         | Pi-hole and get the domain blocking on the go.
        
           | Larrikin wrote:
           | This is the game changer.
           | 
           | I have my first year Pi running Diet Pi with Adguard Home and
           | was just happy that I found a use for such an old machine
           | that I was considering throwing.
           | 
           | The speed test in Diet Pi said that the latest Pis can
           | complete them in a few seconds versus the minutes it took
           | mine to setup, so figured it would be useless but had been
           | working flawlessly as a dns at home and blocking all ads on
           | all devices.
           | 
           | Adding Tailscale took it to the next level and now all my
           | devices have ad blocking on LTE, public wifi, friends houses,
           | everywhere.
        
         | maximilianburke wrote:
         | We use it at work. All our services run on private IPs on our
         | own vnets, and we access them with Tailscale. We don't need to
         | run a VPN tunnel, or manage public IPs and firewall rules.
        
         | vineyardmike wrote:
         | I use it personally and at work.
         | 
         | Personally: - I have a few raspberry Pis and PCs around the
         | house. This lets me SSH into them for maintenance/etc. It's
         | also good for projects and stuff to use their DNS. Eg I can use
         | "http://nas/photos" to get to my photo library instead of an IP
         | address. No TLD is kinda cool (it's just a net search group
         | afaik so reproducible without them) but very memorable for the
         | family. I've also gone as far as to embed their library in a go
         | project I made - it means the same IP address and host name
         | regardless of where the binary is running which is cool. This
         | also means the binary knows who is who when accessing the
         | website it hosts. The ease of doing this makes me feel like
         | projects like OpenZiti bay be the future of zero trust and
         | networking - embed the security into the code via a library and
         | get all the global routing you need for free.
         | 
         | Work: I work at a tiny company (5 of us). We do IOT stuff, and
         | we have a lab with a bunch of equipment, mostly controlled by
         | Raspberry Pis or similar. We're small so we work in a private
         | room in a coworking space. We use tailscale to manage the RPIs
         | and keep consistent IP addresses when we don't have control
         | over the overall network. We also run some internal stuff in
         | AWS over tailscale (eg our staging servers etc). It's hands
         | down the easiest option to onboard people too. It lets us
         | access equipment from home if needed, and it's super
         | lightweight compared to other VPNs I've used.
        
         | modernpacifist wrote:
         | - Entire site-to-site tunneling/routing. I didn't have to do
         | anything for my parents I just dropped a subnet router at their
         | place.
         | 
         | - Access my services/servers at home from anywhere in the
         | world. Friendly mobile apps as well that allow the same.
         | 
         | - In cloud environments (for work and fun), don't even bother
         | provisioning public IPs and having to deal with those firewall
         | rules, just use Tailscale
         | 
         | - https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-auth-nginx/ describes
         | how you can integrate nginx proxying with Tailscale auth to
         | both leverage SSO and the authenticated endpoint
         | 
         | - I have a bootmod3 WiFi adapter plugged into my street/track
         | car with a combo 5G/Linux unit in the car connected to my
         | Tailscale that streams continuous telemetry about the car
         | whenever its turned on. I could in theory re-flash the ECU via
         | this.
         | 
         | - Using https://tailscale.com/kb/ondemand-access/ alongside
         | node/subnet grouping to create a very neat first step towards
         | auditing access to sensitive production services/environments.
         | 
         | - I use server-based dev environments to keep my portable
         | laptop as clean as possible with no source code on it. VS Code
         | remote + Coder server are fantastic over Tailscale.
         | 
         | + others. Tailscale I think solves the problem of node-to-node-
         | to-subnet connectivity at a convenient and flexible layer.
        
           | 0xEFF wrote:
           | What is it that Tailscale provides over plain vanilla
           | wireguard? Is it a static address somewhere to connect to?
        
             | xena wrote:
             | - Key distribution - DNS for your nodes - IP addressing -
             | SSO integration
             | 
             | and so much more
        
             | modernpacifist wrote:
             | It provides a consistent IP address (in the CGNAT range)
             | that the end-device is always reachable at. On top of that
             | you can use MagicDNS or regular DNS records to refer to it.
             | 
             | That IP is usable regardless of how that device and your
             | device actually reach the internet. Further, no one device
             | acts as a "server" and needs a stable public IP thanks to
             | NAT traversal and the DERP fallback path. Keys are handled
             | automatically with an option to not trust Tailscale infra
             | in doing that (Tailscale lock) and I just need to auth
             | devices with my Google Workspace/Gsuite SSO.
        
           | skrebbel wrote:
           | > Entire site-to-site tunneling/routing. I didn't have to do
           | anything for my parents I just dropped a subnet router at
           | their place.
           | 
           | Can you elaborate? What do your parents need tailscale for? I
           | mean my parents have internet purely by the telco dropping a
           | router at their place and it just works, what is my family
           | missing?
        
             | modernpacifist wrote:
             | Mostly standard VPN use cases. They can access my Plex
             | server, Mealie instance and in turn I can remote access
             | their devices without something like TeamViewer when they
             | need IT Support or their home automation stuff is acting
             | up.
             | 
             | Would their lives fall apart without it? No. But it makes
             | my life as the family SRE much easier.
        
             | marsokod wrote:
             | In my case that's actually multiple functions: remote login
             | without using TeamViewer and also for general remote
             | support, and I have a small backup server at the place for
             | my off-site backups.
        
             | sleepybrett wrote:
             | This is no longer a problem for me since I switched my
             | parents from windows to mac, but remote desktop login to
             | troubleshoot their problems would be a huge bonus.
             | 
             | Other cool things I could do if I dropped a raspberry-pi w/
             | tailscale onto their network:
             | 
             | - Need another public IP to test something? Route my laptop
             | through their network for awhile.
             | 
             | - share files with them or backup some of their devices to
             | a fileserver I control.
             | 
             | - send print jobs to their printer, I don't keep a printer
             | but they do because.. and I shit you not, they hate doing
             | crosswords on their ipads, they print the damn things out
             | every morning and work them on paper.
             | 
             | - Put it on their phones and have them route their requests
             | through one of my exit nodes.
        
             | brewdad wrote:
             | Best guess is OP is hosting files or services that are
             | shared with less tech-savvy parents. Similar to our setup.
             | My son is away at college but still wants access to his
             | music and movie collection on our NAS at home along with
             | some other services. He setup a Tailscale connection and
             | everyone is happy. I don't have to manage any of it and he
             | doesn't have to work around the school's firewall and
             | network architecture.
        
           | newman314 wrote:
           | "- I have a bootmod3 WiFi adapter plugged into my
           | street/track car with a combo 5G/Linux unit in the car
           | connected to my Tailscale that streams continuous telemetry
           | about the car whenever its turned on. I could in theory re-
           | flash the ECU via this."
           | 
           | Do you have a writeup or more details you can share around
           | this? This sounds interesting.
        
             | acer589 wrote:
             | lol it sounds like a line from a Fast & Furious movie
        
               | TylerE wrote:
               | That sort of stuff is pretty common. Car guys have lots
               | of disposable income. I'm certain there are devices out
               | there that provide levels of telemetry that was only
               | accessible to top-end racing teams just a decade or two
               | ago.
        
         | jeff18 wrote:
         | As a consumer, I use it for two things and it does it well and
         | very simply across all platforms:
         | 
         | 1) When traveling, you can use one of your home computers as an
         | "exit node" so you can watch Netflix, etc. abroad very easily.
         | Much more reliable than using VPNs which can be blocked.
         | 
         | 2) Accessing your internal network from wherever you are for
         | Plex, Homebridge, IP cameras, or whatever.
        
         | spapas82 wrote:
         | Accessing servers without the need to open their ssh port to
         | the public internet. This is the main point for me. Such
         | functionality could be achieved with other means of course but
         | tailscale makes it so easy and reliable that I don't think any
         | other solution can compete with it.
         | 
         | After I install the tailscale client on the server and do some
         | very simple configuration on the tailscale web app to identify
         | the new node I know I'll be able to access it no matter of any
         | firewalls the node may be behind!
        
         | thefz wrote:
         | I don't expose anything to the internet and use it to access my
         | Synology or my Unraid NAS, to stream Plex music to Plexamp, to
         | check my home network when I am away, and in some cases I have
         | used it to circumvent filtering Proxies by tunneling
         | HTTP/HTTPS.
        
           | morley wrote:
           | Wow, I didn't realize they produce a Synology package!
        
             | thefz wrote:
             | It exists, but I am accessing the LAN via a subnet router.
        
       | rektide wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
       | It's refreshing to see a company that doesn't increase prices or
       | cut features off free plans.
        
       | candiddevmike wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | TL;DR Headscale is great, and we love it. Full details here:
         | https://tailscale.com/blog/opensource/
        
           | candiddevmike wrote:
           | > 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 wrote:
             | Rock on!
        
               | candiddevmike wrote:
               | > 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 wrote:
               | Are you looking to become a customer?
        
               | ckwalsh wrote:
               | 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.
        
         | rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
         | ???
         | 
         | https://tailscale.com/opensource/
        
         | Patrickmi wrote:
         | If I was a threat they wouldn't have allowed changing of
         | servers for their mobile app, truth is that not everyone wants
         | to self host everything
        
           | juanfont wrote:
           | Or they would not be supporting the development of Headscale.
        
       | gilbertbw wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | subarctic wrote:
         | 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
        
           | mostcallmeyt wrote:
           | Yeah. I had a feeling of dread when I saw the "Changes to
           | your Tailscale plan" email subject, but then was positively
           | surprised by many of the changes. For smaller companies,
           | getting the first three users for free will also be nice.
           | 
           | Previously almost all features were available [0] on all
           | plans, though with certain restrictions that made sense (and
           | some that didn't). I was hitting those limits and wanted to
           | get approval for us to purchase the Team plan.
           | 
           | But now I see that features have been stripped out of the
           | "new" Team plan -- and was also frustrated that I couldn't
           | find any information on this. I guess overall the pricing
           | structure makes sense for them, but it's frustrating to not
           | have this clearer in their article.
           | 
           | I suppose I can live without things like Funnel and SSH, and
           | don't need Okta etc., but paying the new ACL tax for Starter
           | to Premium (a $12 jump per user) is more painful.
           | 
           | Overall a positive, but with rough edges which unfortunately
           | hurt me. But perhaps there'll be some tweaks in future, and
           | perhaps again the opportunity to pay for individual feature
           | upgrades.
           | 
           | [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230417141600/https://tails
           | cale...
        
         | christop wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | andrewguenther wrote:
       | No more limits on subnet routers is huge! Amazing!!
        
         | sccxy wrote:
         | Raspberry Pi to parents house and IT support is much easier now
         | :)
        
       | omblivion wrote:
       | I really like this change of plans, I use Tailscale daily and
       | this affirms their presence into my tech ecosystem
        
       | wg0 wrote:
       | Tailscale is doing to Wire guard what Git hub did to git. Even
       | further mainstreamed it.
        
       | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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/
        
           | nottorp wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | ShakataGaNai wrote:
       | 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/ 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 wrote:
         | > 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.)
        
       | lnxg33k1 wrote:
       | 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
        
       | amluto wrote:
       | 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?
        
       | george88b wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | KMnO4 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | more_corn wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | cooljacob204 wrote:
       | How does the multiple users work? I don't see an option to invite
       | other users.
        
         | bradfitz wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | cooljacob204 wrote:
           | Ah so not really all that realistic for personal use with
           | multiple users.
        
           | tailspin2019 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | 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.
        
       | wpietri wrote:
       | 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-al...
        
       | ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
       | Why can I not zoom into these graphs on mobile?
        
       | vvladymyrov wrote:
       | 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.`
        
       | carbocation wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | th0ma5 wrote:
       | 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?
        
       | tomjen3 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | hjuutilainen wrote:
       | 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!
        
         | JAlexoid wrote:
         | Irony is that you get less features, according to their pricing
         | feature graph...
        
           | leodag wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | wintogreen74 wrote:
         | 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
        
         | tailspin2019 wrote:
         | 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!
        
         | throwaway290 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | thelittleone wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | thefz wrote:
         | Exactly the same for me. Awesome company.
        
         | is_true wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | I'd just keep paying them just for sending this mail. Kudos!
        
         | ignoramous wrote:
         | 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).
        
         | Xeoncross wrote:
         | That's the way to nickle-and-dime your customers so they're
         | always looking around for an alternative! /s
        
       | codethief wrote:
       | 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... )
        
         | sconi wrote:
         | Curious why you want to run Headscale? Is it purely to avoid
         | the risks of the coordination server?
        
       | KMnO4 wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | 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 wrote:
             | That's this https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/ right?
        
               | Jtsummers wrote:
               | Yes, that's the one.
        
         | vlovich123 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | [deleted]
        
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