Tools/tailscale/tailscale

Tailscale

Easiest way to use WireGuard

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The Lens

By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.

Updated Oct 2026

Tailscale puts all your devices on one private network that works through firewalls without opening a port. It runs on WireGuard and handles the key exchange, NAT traversal and device management that make raw WireGuard painful. The core client is BSD-3 open source; the coordination server is not. Personal is free for up to 6 users with unlimited personal devices.

Setup is install the app and log in. Traffic goes device to device, or through Tailscale's DERP relays when a direct path fails. If the coordination server goes down, existing devices keep talking until their keys expire, but nobody new can join and keys can't be revoked. Headscale is the open source stand-in.

The paywall is about who you are. Personal is non-commercial only, and SSO and ACLs are on every plan, which is fair. Business use means Standard at $8 per user per month, or Premium at $18 for flow logs, log streaming and just-in-time access. Solo: free. Small work teams: Standard. Larger teams: Premium or Enterprise.

The catch: Tailscale SSH was the soft spot this year, with two separate bugs letting a user with limited SSH access open a root shell, fixed in 1.98.9. Keep clients on auto-update.

Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid

freemium

Free: Personal, $0 and labeled free forever: unlimited user devices, up to 6 users, 3 ACL groups, 50 tagged resources (exit nodes, servers and the like) and 1,000 minutes per month of ephemeral resources. Every plan includes peer-to-peer connections, subnet routers and exit nodes, MagicDNS, ACLs, peer relays, Funnel, Kubernetes ingress and egress, SSO with any identity provider, user and device approval, webhooks and configuration audit logs. Personal is only for non-commercial use: a tailnet created with Gmail, Apple or a personal GitHub account is treated as personal, while a custom-domain signup counts as business use and starts a 14-day Enterprise trial instead.

Self-hosted: The tailscaled daemon and CLI are BSD-3-Clause open source; the macOS, iOS and Windows GUI wrappers and the coordination server are closed. You can run your own DERP relays, and Headscale (an independent open source project) can replace the coordination server while you keep the official clients. If Tailscale's coordination server is unavailable, existing devices keep working until their keys expire, but you cannot add devices or revoke keys.

Paid: Seat-based, billed per user per month. Standard is $8 per user per month: unlimited users, SCIM provisioning, 10 ACL groups, MDM configuration, device posture integrations (MDM, EDR, XDR), advanced user roles and access to support SLAs. Premium is $18 per user per month: 300 ACL groups, 10,000 ephemeral minutes, just-in-time access, advanced Tailscale SSH, network flow logs, log streaming and regional routing. Enterprise is custom pricing with custom limits, a custom MSA and pay by invoice (annual invoicing is an Enterprise option; no annual discount is published for Standard or Premium). Add-ons: extra tagged resources at $1 per month each, Mullvad exit nodes at $5 per month for every 5 devices, plus sales-quoted PAM, CI/CD, workload, IoT and Aperture extensions. On monthly plans, a new user joining a full tailnet adds a seat that is charged immediately, prorated. Legacy Starter, Premium and Business customers can stay on their plans for now and will be migrated after the first year.

Free for personal, non-commercial use with up to 6 users and unlimited devices. Any business use means Standard at $8 per user per month, or Premium at $18 when you need network flow logs, log streaming or just-in-time access.

What to do by team size

Solo: free Personal plan: unlimited devices, up to 6 users, non-commercial use only
Small team: Standard at $8 per user per month for a work tailnet, or Headscale if someone will run the server
Medium team: Standard; Premium at $18 per user per month once you need flow logs, log streaming or just-in-time access
Large team: Enterprise for custom limits, a custom MSA and invoicing; Premium is the top self-serve tier

Self-hosting ops:trivial

View pricing page →

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