It is quite clearly stated in both this announcement and the docs [1] that it is available for the personal (aka free) plan. Not sure why their pricing plan does not include any mention of it.
What is their incentive to offer such a service for free?
Following the adage "if it's for free, you are the product", what is going on behind the scenes? Are they providing their services as a giant honey-pot to sniff on traffic?
Their response in the past about their free tiers has been that it's low cost to offer and it results in larger sales (devs use it themselves, like it and bring it to places they work).
> TL;DR: Tailscale’s free plan is free because we keep our scaling costs low relative to typical SaaS companies. We care about privacy, so unlike some other freemium models, you and your data are not the product. Rather, increased word-of-mouth from free plans sells the more valuable corporate plans. I know, it sounds too good to be true. Let’s see some details.
So it's a weighed choice between "if something seems like it's too good to be true, it often is", and "the explanations they give make good sense, and it's a way of doing business that some ethical company could choose to take".
We probably won't know in the short-to-medium term, so we'll have to take their word for it..
But I must admit, their products look pretty impressive. I'll have to have a closer look at them.
For what it's worth the scaling costs for their service are quite low. Tailscale connections are almost entirely peer to peer after an initial NAT busting operation. They can afford to do a loss leader like this and the product is actually so good that I've recommended it to a number of places. It's literally the first VPN that I think is worth paying for. I wouldn't have known that if the free tier didn't exist. Using is believing in their case. It's not uncommon to be literally angry at how easy it is to set up/manage/deploy given how much of a trash fire most vpn software is.
> Tailscale connections are almost entirely peer to peer after an initial NAT busting operation.
Ah, interesting, thanks. That would indeed make it a lot less costly. I would need to dive into it to get a better understanding how their service works.
Would you happen to have some good resources you found useful?
Well, this addresses the sniffing concern. From the link:
Note that the private key never, ever leaves its node. This is important because the private key is the only thing that could potentially be used to impersonate that node when negotiating a WireGuard session. As a result, only that node can encrypt packets addressed from itself, or decrypt packets addressed to itself. It’s important to keep that in mind: Tailscale node connections are end-to-end encrypted (a concept called “zero trust networking”).
What you are describing is quite literally the UX, the user experience, and Slack overall has quite a good one. Although several of the newer features are somewhat lacking in that regard, like the threads feature.
[1] https://tailscale.com/kb/1193/tailscale-ssh