Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
Just use normal wireguard, why do you need tails or heads at all?
Tailscale offers way more then just wireguard. ACLs, NAT traversal etc. etc.
While some use cases can be replaced with traditional wireguard, others not.
I’m curious what kind of a use case you can think of that “traditional wireguard” can’t replace tailscale for.
Tailscale has a maximum of 3 users on their free tier, so it seems like a super limited use case of people who DIY their own servers for Jellyfin or HomAssistant or whatever, but just a tad too lazy to setup their own Wireguard service in addition to whatever it is they’d be using it for… I think the vast majority of free tailscale users have simply never actually tried wg-easy , because if they did they wouldnt need to use a third party service.
Big difference in users and devices here. Tailscale might have a 3 user limit, but you can add up to 100 devices for free. So for me for example I have tailscale running in each and every docker container in my NAS. So each and every container can now act as a node on my tailnet. Users isn’t a big deal, any one node can activate funnel with a simple command and poof its available to the public. The convenience coupled with simplicity is what makes Tailscale so god damn good.
Can you segregate connections between different nodes on the tailnet, like say node G and H can only talk to each other and no other nodes?
Not sure, not tried that as that’s outside my use case. But I would assume its possible with ACLs!
@gravitywell you miss the whole goodie-part like funnels, acls, certs etc.
ACLs for me are really valuable as i’m using for a small team (3ppl) for server/app admin. @ShortN0te
I think ACL is a paid feature with TS, but maybe im wrong. Once you get to the paid tier, you are just paying someone else to manage your VPN, which is fair enough but its not something you could’t also pay someone to do with wireguard (or openVPN for that matter). I think its fair to say “I pay for this service because i don’t want to have to deal with configuring it myself”, it might be easier to setup for some use cases, but if someone is already self-hosting things and has a DIY attitude to it, I don’t think tailscale can do anything wireguard can’t also do (it is based on WG afterall)
Maybe I’m not familiar enough with other kinds of setups to think of things though. My wireguard setup is basically a meshnet between several people’s home servers, each person has their own subnet only they can use, but the wider 10.X.X.X is shared by everyone, its certainly not the most secure because it doesnt need to be, but if i wanted to restrict one persons access to something i certainly could do that.
ACLs are on the free tier too.
Accessing your home network that is kept inside a NAT by your ISP, without you having to acquire an online server somewhere.
Except you do need to acquire an online server somewhere, its just one that tailscale owns and controls instead of you, and when tailscale decides to enshittify and kill of their free tier you’ll be left wondering why you didn’t just rent a cheap VPS sooner.
Ask yourself, what is tailscale getting out of those “free” users that makes it worth providing services to them that they’d otherwsie need to rent a VPS for? What do you think their response would be if for example they got pressured about maybe too many users on their network are running a certain video streaming app?
You really don’t though. I use wireguard myself under the same scenario without issue. You just need to use some form of dynamic DNS to mitigate the potentially changing IP. Even if you’re using Tailscale you’ll still need to have something running a service all the time anyways, so may as well skip the proxy.
If you only need to worry about the IP changing, then your ISP is not using NAT, or CGNAT as it is better known. I’m pretty sure that you can also use port forwarding, which is not commonly available under CGNAT.
Ah, I see where I got confused. Yeah, CGNAT isn’t very common around here. I don’t think I’ve ever run into an ISP that uses it. I can see how that complicates things.
It’s more common with mobile-based connections like satellite connections or mobile-LTE data based connections, I believe.
Your approach won’t work if you’re behind carrier grade NAT or you can’t open ports. My landlord provides my internet so I use tailscale (with headscale on my long distance vps) to connect everything and it works great. It uses LAN when I’m home, and NAT punches when I’m elsewhere.
Or be like me stuck in the 2000s using OpenVPN still in 2025 lol