Changes to Tailscale Pricing and Plans

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.

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.

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".

Yes, that's the one.

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.