On the other hand, it likely means I’ll lose the ability to use Tailscale at work. We’re a small startup with 8 people in our Tailnet, though only about half are active in a given month. Right now we’re paying somewhere between $6 to $12 depending on usage, but if I’m reading the new pricing correctly, that jumps to $64 a month. That’s a pretty steep increase for us.
I swag this work to take:
1 engineer 8 hours to honestly evaluate alternatives, their licenses, the likelihood they will move towards a similar model in the next ~3 years, number of stars on GitHub, etc
2+ engineers 2 hours to agree on the path forward
1 engineer 2 hours to implement to new solution
8 engineers 1 hour to switch to the new solution
1 engineer 1 hour to finalize the removal of the old solution
I’ll call it 24 hours of work total, how much are you paying your engineers? Let’s say an easy 100$/hr. At this rate, it would cost $2400 and take 4 years to break even on doing this work (assuming the new solution has feature parity at the old 12$/month rate)
If I was tailscale doing this math, I would bet your startup is not gunna do this work to migrate away from tailscale right now because of this price increase.
I get there are lots of tools that all add up, but even paying an extra $2,000/yr per dev isn't really that much for the time savings. But for some reason we're fickle, we think things should be cheaper than a daily coffee because "we can create this ourselves".
I get where you're coming from, but you do realize that developers aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions, right?
- Reduction from 100 to 50 tagged devices on Personal (was 100 total devices before)/Standard (was 100 + 10 per user before)
- ~~Limit to 1000minutes/month (16.6 days) for ephemeral devices (simply counted towards the total device limit before), meaning you can't even have a single permanently connected ephemeral device anymore on Personal/Standard~~ This is incorrect, see comment below
- Limit of 3 ACL groups on the Personal plan (previously no limit), but also allows 10 ACL groups on the Standard plan (previously had no access to the feature)
Unfortunately, the pricing for extra devices and ephemeral devices is "contact sales".
50 tagged resources is the new limit, but there is no longer any limit on user-owned devices, previously, they were bundled together in that 100 limit.
Thanks for explaining, that makes the limit very reasonable. I updated my comment
Ephemeral keys can still be used to manage long-lived devices when you want them automatically cleaned up if they disappear - they'll just count as tagged nodes when they hit that 241 minute age.
It's admittedly tough to know what features Plus had vs the new matrix
[1]: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/webvm-virtual-machine-with...
Keep in mind that we also plan to offer builtin networking in the near future, we are developing the infrastructure to do so as part of our newest product (In-browser sandboxes): https://browserpod.io
We architected our infrastructure around Tailscale (under their "now legacy" Premium plan) under the reasonable assumption that these specific usage patterns wouldn't suddenly become cost centers. For context, we run on-prem Kubernetes with Flannel as CNI in host-gw mode, using Tailscale purely as the underlying transport. Because of this architecture, every Kubernetes node acts as a subnet router, which now neatly falls into their newly monetized "tagged resource" bucket.
Because of this pricing change, we're now looking at a one-year ticking clock. Our options are to either walk into an enterprise sales negotiation at a severe information asymmetry disadvantage to keep our current architecture, or rip out our networking layer entirely. I've already added an "Evaluate Netbird" to our team's backlog.
So it's deeply disappointing, but perhaps we should have seen it coming. I already perceive this as the standard lifecycle of a VC-backed HN darling: build immense goodwill with developer-friendly terms, embed yourself as a deep infrastructure dependency, and then aggressively squeeze the margins once the lock-in is established.
Sorry about the Contact Sales bit; it's temporary. Our full intention is to allow self-serve purchasing of these things, it's on our near-term roadmap.
In your current plan, all devices are grouped into a single category, and you are allotted 100 devices plus an additional 20 devices per user in the tailnet. We've typically been pretty generous on enforcing this limitation. In the new plan, we have instead offered unlimited devices owned by users, and 50 owned by tags.
I'd love to understand more about your use case and understand how we can make the transition easier for you (not a sales call). Feel free to reach out sam [at] tailscale.com if you'd like to chat!
I've evangelised using Tailscale at our company and the 100+(20 * user) limit was very comfortable for us at our level of scale. Cutting that to 50 + "contact sales for pricing" means that our use-case is no longer supported. We use Tailscale as the control plane for remote access to embedded devices we ship around the world - we use tagged devices far more than user devices. I think most tech-focussed companies will also have far more tagged devices than user devices. Anything that discourages us from tagging a server or a random dev machine and putting it on Tailscale will reduce our use of the service and ultimately reduces the "stickiness" that you are probably aiming for.
I also think capping Tailscale SSH to 5 devices on the standard plan kneecaps the value. It's probably in the top 3 most "magical" features of Tailscale. Who has only 5 servers?
I'm happy to pay more if that's what is needed but I resent the "contact sales for pricing". I waste so much of my time jumping through sales hoops with vendors and have a strong preference for vendors that will openly tell me on their website how much my use case will cost.
