new_otters_raftTailscale Services GA: App-aware connectivity with more control
Avid AmoebaWhile this is great, especially for smaller self-hosters, as a setup gets more and more dependent on Tailscale, one should think about self-hosting Headscale, and therefore not being over-reliant on services not offered by it. I’m in that boat and I haven’t done the Headscale migration yet.
irmadladWhat is it about Tailscale that is giving you heartburn? I am over reliant on my ISP. Without them, selfhosting would be rather bland.
Ownership, size and profit growth strategy. My ISP is a massively profitable poorly regulated oligopoly. The deal there is clear - they’re already charging as much as the market can afford. They aren’t providing a free service today that they’ll have to monetize down the line to compensate for the time operating on VC funding. Tailscale, awesome as it is today, is in my view guaranteed to enshittify over time as they start getting pressed to grow profit. That’s not too much of a problem for me since the clients I use are open source and there’s an alternative open source server. If I used features unavailable in Headscale or were in over my head and unable to self-host Headscale, I might be in a bad time some time down the line.
Would it make you feel better if you paid Tailscale for one of their plans? It’s not like they are just giving away their whole enterprise. It’s fairly trivial for them to give free services, kind of like Cloudflare, Oracle, et al. Reading a bit reveals:
- Tailscale’s estimated annual revenue is currently $45.2M per year.
- Tailscale’s estimated revenue per employee is $230,489
- Tailscale’s total funding is $277M.
- Tailscale’s current valuation is $1.5B. (April 2025)
- Tailscale has 196 Employees.
- Tailscale grew their employee count by 23% last year.
That seems pretty profitable. Enshitification happens. It’s been going on since I was born. If it’s free on the internet, and later it becomes a paid service, then I just find something else that fits. Or pony up the cheapest plan they have, which currently is their Personal Plus @ $5 USD per month. I don’t mind paying for a good service and $5 USD is burger from McDonalds. Extremely well under what most people put into a hobby. Will prices increase? Maybe…everything goes up. Rarely do services and utilities go down in price. When the price points are no longer justifiable, again, I look for something else that fits.
kurcatoviumThere’s also Netbird, worth checking out.
Lettuce eat lettuceNetbird and Pangolin too.
That’s one way to look at it. I used to look at paid VC-funded services like that. I no longer do as I’ve observed services I paid good money for get more expensive much faster than inflation and decrease in quality and features at the same time. It’s one reason I self-host many services I used to pay third parties for. I now look to alternatives from the get go and derisk existing dependencies. To be clear - profitability isn’t merely the only problem. The ownership and its profit growth strategy (and expectations) are. Those are not the same in a decades old ISP and a VC-funded startup.
Merely being profitable today isn’t a good predictor for stable prices and function over the long run for VC-funded services. I’m not planning to do major surgery to my setup every few years as yet another service shits the bed. The workstation/server where my self-hosted services run has last been reinstalled in 2014. Most of my config-as-code was written in 2019. I support a few families with this and I aim at maximum stability with minimal maintenance. So I use open source whenever I can and I often pay for development. I only integrated Tailscale in my setup because the clients are open source and because there’s an open source server option.
I’m not saying to people - don’t use Tailscale. In fact I often recommend it to new self-hosters. But I do that because there’s a way out. So here I’m reminding people who care about a way out to check if this feature is escapable. :D
non_burglarEnshitification happens.
I don’t think that’s a given necessarily, I think it’s a common pattern under the vc funding -> IPO model.
But companies like Steam and Patagonia show that companies don’t all have to follow the same predictable enshittification arc.