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.
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!
It's admittedly tough to know what features Plus had vs the new matrix
minus7•1h ago
- 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".
JayWS•55m ago
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.
vluft•48m ago
JayWS•40m ago
vluft•35m ago
ts-samlinville•13m ago
minus7•16m ago
Thanks for explaining, that makes the limit very reasonable. I updated my comment
tailscaler2026•7m ago
JayWS•42s ago
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.