[pepemon]

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.

[ts-samlinville]

Hey there! Tailscalar here, I work on our Product team.

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!

[noodlesUK]

Respectfully I think this is a mistake. You should not have released the pricing update without making this self-service.

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.