I am currently using Tailscale just within the free "Solo" pricing tier, so cost has not been an issue. Compared to alternatives, it's as close to fire-and-forget as I think you can get. Everything just works, and they've been working hard to keep it that way. The sort of software I like.
If you're a larger business, the pricing seems... fine? I don't know what their enterprising pricing is like, but the next-highest tier appears to cap at $10k/yr, which seems like a trivial cost to anyone operating at that scale.
Consider also that you don't need to run tailscale on every host -- though you could. Depending on your architecture, a single gateway instance in each VPC could be sufficient. In other words, I could probably scale the two non-enterprise tiers very, very far, at least until you had close to ~500 employees, in which case you probably want to strike a deal for custom support and SAML SSO anyways.
Alternatively, at $LAST_JOB we just ran our own OpenVPN servers and in-house beyondcorp authwalls. There was honestly not a lot of complexity in there. We had <3000 employees.
> That makes sense our user-oriented VPNs (dev workstations, home machines, and phones), but doesn't feel like it's oriented towards server use.
Just to be clear, you don't pay per-server. Just for logins.
> My end use case is probably 80% securing server connectivity across sites.
100% is not by any means an unachievable goal in, say, a quarter or two. Any reason why you don't want that 20% tail?
Ah that makes a lot more sense. I run tailscale on a subset of my servers, but I use tailscale to talk to all of them.
For example, I can use my desktop at home as an exit node for my phone, so I can configure my network hardware (router, switch, AP) from my phone, from anywhere.
If you're a larger business, the pricing seems... fine? I don't know what their enterprising pricing is like, but the next-highest tier appears to cap at $10k/yr, which seems like a trivial cost to anyone operating at that scale.
Consider also that you don't need to run tailscale on every host -- though you could. Depending on your architecture, a single gateway instance in each VPC could be sufficient. In other words, I could probably scale the two non-enterprise tiers very, very far, at least until you had close to ~500 employees, in which case you probably want to strike a deal for custom support and SAML SSO anyways.
Alternatively, at $LAST_JOB we just ran our own OpenVPN servers and in-house beyondcorp authwalls. There was honestly not a lot of complexity in there. We had <3000 employees.
> That makes sense our user-oriented VPNs (dev workstations, home machines, and phones), but doesn't feel like it's oriented towards server use.
Just to be clear, you don't pay per-server. Just for logins.
> My end use case is probably 80% securing server connectivity across sites.
100% is not by any means an unachievable goal in, say, a quarter or two. Any reason why you don't want that 20% tail?