from Hacker News

Changes to Tailscale Pricing and Plans

by bvogelzang on 4/18/23, 4:04 PM with 114 comments

• by hjuutilainen on 4/18/23, 4:13 PM

  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!

• by ospider on 5/2/23, 2:49 PM

  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.

• by wpietri on 4/18/23, 5:04 PM

  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...

• by ShakataGaNai on 4/18/23, 4:41 PM

  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".

• by morley on 4/18/23, 4:34 PM

  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.

• by gilbertbw on 4/18/23, 4:55 PM

  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.

• by lnxg33k1 on 4/18/23, 4:25 PM

  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

• by amluto on 4/18/23, 6:47 PM

  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?

• by rektide on 4/18/23, 4:20 PM

  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.

• by george88b on 4/18/23, 5:03 PM

  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.

• by pja on 4/18/23, 4:52 PM

  > 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!?

• by carbocation on 4/18/23, 4:29 PM

  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.

• by KMnO4 on 4/18/23, 4:15 PM

  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.

• by codethief on 4/18/23, 9:00 PM

  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... )

• by candiddevmike on 4/18/23, 4:37 PM

  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.

• by mlangenberg on 4/19/23, 11:36 AM

  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?

• by tomjen3 on 4/18/23, 7:08 PM

  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.

• by more_corn on 4/18/23, 5:39 PM

  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.

• by th0ma5 on 4/18/23, 7:25 PM

  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?

• by omblivion on 4/18/23, 4:37 PM

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

• by manuelabeledo on 4/18/23, 4:55 PM

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

• by wg0 on 4/18/23, 8:34 PM

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

• by cooljacob204 on 4/18/23, 4:28 PM

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

• by andrewguenther on 4/18/23, 4:37 PM

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

• by ThePowerOfFuet on 4/18/23, 10:09 PM

  Why can I not zoom into these graphs on mobile?

• by rmrf100 on 4/21/23, 5:26 AM

  You guys rocks!

• by vvladymyrov on 4/18/23, 4:13 PM

  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.`

• by 2Gkashmiri on 4/18/23, 4:58 PM

  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.