This is potentiallya bit of a downgrade if you are using the Personal or Standard plans for infrastructure:
- 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".
Reposting my comment from Reddit: Honestly, I’m a bit torn. On the one hand, I’m personally thrilled that the free plan now includes 6 seats, which is perfect for my home setup and honestly more than I expected.
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.
This is exactly why I will never create a business that sells to developers. Some of the highest paid individuals on the planet cannot fathom paying for tools that make their life easy.
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".
Introducing billing for ephemeral nodes and tagged resources behind an opaque "Contact Sales" wall doesn't feel like generosity, it feels like a classic bait-and-switch.
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.
I'm on personal plus ($5) now. Should I change anything? I'm the only user in my tailnet and have 4 devices. I think I would probably be better served downgrading to the new free tier?
It's admittedly tough to know what features Plus had vs the new matrix
Oh noes… I’m a single-user but I have just a little under 50 tagged devices and a lot of ACLs. I don’t think my tagged device count is getting any smaller since I like to play around in my homelab. Been paying the Personal Plus subscription since I’m getting a lot of value out of Tailscale. Hopefully I can purchase some upgrades to the Personal plan.
I have seen some demos online such as WebVM [1] that use ephemeral devices to enable networking within the browser. It sounds like there is now a limit on the total length of ephemeral sessions on an account that last less than 240 minutes. While I'm not currently affected by this limit, it does seem rather arbitrary.
With all the talk of simplifying things in the blog post, I had high hopes that were dashed against the rocks when I looked at the continuing insane complexity of the pricing page. Honestly, it's like looking at Charlie's murder board in Always Sunny. The one feature I use in Tailscale, ssh with magic DNS, seems to have unlimited hosts for the Personal plan and 5 hosts for the next step up. I would love to give you guys money, you just won't let me.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 30.5 ms ] thread- 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".
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 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".
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.
It's admittedly tough to know what features Plus had vs the new matrix
[1]: https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/webvm-virtual-machine-with...