Live data from Hacker News

Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

tailscale.com

41–50 of 267 posts

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#41

I wish I could read this but got this[0] guy on mobile with no close button, won't close when you click outside the modal. 0: https://i.postimg.cc/14h3Q9mD/Screenshot-20260219-001356-Chr... Edit: Nvm, found it. Weird place to put it.

I see a white X in a blue box to the lower right of the modal. Is it that?

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#42

I wish I could read this but got this[0] guy on mobile with no close button, won't close when you click outside the modal. 0: https://i.postimg.cc/14h3Q9mD/Screenshot-20260219-001356-Chr... Edit: Nvm, found it. Weird place to put it.

I see a white X in a blue box to the lower right of the modal. Is it that?

That was it, ok now I feel stupid.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#43
post #3

How does Tailscale make money? I really like their service but I'm worried about a rug pull in the future. Has anyone tried alternative FOSS solutions? Also, sometimes it seems like I get rate limited on Tailscale. Has anyone had that experience? This usually happens with multiple SSH connections at the same time.

There are a number of features and teamsizes that they provide where you have to pay money. Most company users are going to end up paying them money. But also their emphasis on P2P connections means their costs are quite low. It doesn't add much overhead to have the smallish number of personal users out there. They've talked about how having the free tier helps to force them keep those costs down in useful ways.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a white X in a blue box to the lower right of the modal. Is it that?

That was it, ok now I feel stupid.

You’re not stupid. That’s terrible UX. The button is completely disconnected from its modal, and is placed in a bizarre/nonstandard location.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#45
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wrote a blog post addressing this concern: https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan

The Tl;Dr here is that the cost to them of operating the free tier is lower than what they estimate their Customer Acquisition Cost would be without a free tier, so the free tier generates better leads/conversions to their paid products at a lower cost than traditional sales and marketing. As long as these economics continue to hold they'd be stupid to discontinue the free tier.

But it isn't 'economics' as there is no actual data or science here, just a wild guess about what customer acquisition might currently cost. All it takes to rug pull is some exec speculating that 'the economics' have changed.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#46
post #3

How does Tailscale make money? I really like their service but I'm worried about a rug pull in the future. Has anyone tried alternative FOSS solutions? Also, sometimes it seems like I get rate limited on Tailscale. Has anyone had that experience? This usually happens with multiple SSH connections at the same time.

Wouldn't the FOSS alternative be to simply use wireguard?

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#47
post #37
post #3

How does Tailscale make money? I really like their service but I'm worried about a rug pull in the future. Has anyone tried alternative FOSS solutions? Also, sometimes it seems like I get rate limited on Tailscale. Has anyone had that experience? This usually happens with multiple SSH connections at the same time.

> How does Tailscale make money? They spy on your network behavior by default, so free users are still paying with their behavioral data. See https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging “Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.com). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your networ…

Pretty much this. DNS, SNI, and otherwise plaintext traffic sniffing. That together with user/device 'fingerprinting' (a much more amorphous concept), and that's why such-and-such thing you were just talking about with so-and-so pops up on your screen/feed/whatever, sometimes only minutes later.

I highly doubt any of this can actually be opted-out of. How else would they stay in business?

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#48
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our company pays for the premium business plan, $18/mo/user. You have to pay for at least the lower tier plan once your team grows beyond a handful of people. And there's several quite useful features (though maybe not essential) on the premium plan like serve/funnel and SSH. On the other hand, I do wonder about zerotier. before tailscale we used zerotier for a few years, and during the first 3-4 years we paid nothin…

How do you handle the do-before-thinking devs? Or the kinda low-to-mid performing devs? Most companies has one or a few of those, right? They help the company machine go around by doing the somewhat boring stuff over and over again. Tailscale in a company/developer env seems awesome when you know what you are doing and (potentially) terrifying otherwise. Does someone set up detailed ACLs for what's allowed? How well…

> How do you handle the do-before-thinking devs?

Isn't that exactly what tailscale is built to accommodate - zero trust?

You set up ACLs and other permissions to not allow people to do more than the damage you can tolerate.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#49
post #38

It's a bit disingenuous to present solutions like Tailscale as more secure than opening a VPN port on one's on machine. The latter solution should always be preferred when available just because you don't want your infrastructure to depend on a "free" service which might cease to be free tomorrow.

Things are much more unscrupulous than potentially ceasing to be free tomorrow. Nobody who values their privacy would ever route their network traffic through a 'free' service.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#50
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love tailscale but you may be right, it's entering that acquisition zone that'll inevitably bum everyone out. Salesforce, stay away from it!

I have the same fears. Last year they have publicly stated they are not interested in acquisition [0] > Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO). > “Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pe…

Would be curious if a partial decompilation and short static analysis would yield any reliable info about what they might be collecting.
Post reply on HN