Tailscale raises $100M

You're not wrong but they do seem to want to keep focusing on consumers (not just developers), teams, and enterprises all at the same time but market [0] the product differently.

> If we're going to fix the Internet, there's no point only fixing it for big companies who can pay a lot. That misses the point of the whole adventure. The Internet is for everyone. We have to fix it for everyone, or why bother? We knew we had to design a business model and a technical architecture that removes any incentive to abuse your privacy. Providing an ever-expanding free tier is how we help as many people as possible.

> ...

> Tailscale's go-to-market strategy is what we call bottom-up growth, or product-led growth (PLG). An earlier name for this is "GTM 3.0", which is explained beautifully in a presentation by Adam Gross... To summarize: in GTM 3.0, you give away an unlimited free tier for individual use (Not a trial, a free tier; this is what makes it different from GTM 2.0). Then, for collaboration in small teams, you charge a bit. Then, for big company control and auditability, you charge even more. At each level, the value proposition is different, so that users use your tech differently and benefit differently from it. And at each level, the buyer is different, so the messaging is different.

From tailscale.com/blog: How our free plan stays free, https://archive.is/R7jqw

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix

But you can also try to get them to be Tailscale users and effortlessly share the devices with access control features they built. I share my home servers and game servers with family/friends easily while still keeping everything off the public internet.

They don't want to build basic auth. They probably could, but it gives them more headaches and customer service touch points compared to delegating that out. Like: what if the user forgets their password? Or what if they lose their 2FA device?

"Being based on open source wireguard, and being just a STUN/TURN server at its core... I'm sure that Tailscale will be the first but maybe not the best."

I like this assessment. "[J]ust a STUN/TURN server at its core." It gives me hope maybe more people are starting to learn how to look at peer-to-peer not as something that is unreasonably complex and off-limits to ordinary users. LAN-like connectivity is not just for offices and gamers.

Of course, following a STUN/TURN standard is just one approach to a rendezvous server. It isn't the first or last approach to have worked.

By "rendezvous server" I mean a program that accepts connections and saves each client's address and open port number and makes this data available to other connecting clients, thereby allowing one client to connect directly to another client without involving the rendezvous server. The server needs only to tell clients about IP addresses and port numbers, nothing more.^1 Thus it can be a relatively small, relatively simple program.^2

I hope that going forward there will be even more choice in small, open source rendezvous servers, not created for commercial purposes, that ordinary users can run on globally reachable IP addresses. Most users must "lease" these addresses from others. Because not every user has a globally reachable IP address available, the use of "hosting" and now what people today call "cloud" services has been necessary.

Enormous amounts of traffic are passing through these third party "cloud" providers. They are, to use a popular term, "gatekeepers". Business customers, including ones who already control globally reachable IPv4 address space, let alone individual customers without such resources, are effectively beholden to them if they want to be on the internet. Not only that, the services are generally expensive.

However no data needs to be sent to or received from a rendezvous server other than address and port information. If customers are charged based on ingress/egress, it could be affordable for users to run these small programs on a "cloud server" due to the smaller amount of data transfer. With less data being sent to these third party providers, the privacy concerns would arguably be reduced as well (cf. eliminated).

The ability to connect devices directly over a network, including the internet, should not be monopolised like so many other aspects of the computers and the internet today. It should be available for everyone. The only cost should be paying for the globally reachable IP address and a tiny amount of traffic required for running a rendezvous server.

1. The advantage here is that the program can be easier and quicker to compile and users may be more inclined to read the source code and, optionally, make edits and recompile. Non-commercial, not a complex program like a web browser that is prohibitively slow to compile that almost no one compiles for themselves, nor one that few people have both the aptitude and inclination to read, edit and improve its source code.

2. Yes, there can be exceptions. For example, in some cases two clients using the same ISP might not be able to reach other directly. But these cases are the exceptions, not the rule.

It's a really neat piece of software - you're right that it does have the ability to configure your system, routing tables in particular.

The Tailscale agent (thing that runs on your machine) changes the system routing table (at least on Linux) and uses policy-based routing (marks packets destined for the "Tailnet" specially) to build the overlay network. Since everything is done at L3 in the OSI model, iOS and Android clients (in the form of an app) are also available without needing root (jailbreaking).

There are some things it can't do owing to the whole thing operating at L3, but it's a really awesome implementation nevertheless. And just to add, they aren't the first to build a product like this, but they do it incredibly well and the time to value for most users is extremely short, made even better by the fact that the expectation is that the time to value will be long(ish) and painful.