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.
become profitable when needed
By what, laying off all QA and support staff and half your developers the moment a single quarterly earnings report isn’t spotlessly gilded?
a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed
Switch to self-hosting headscale when they enshittify in an attempt to become profitable, duh
Been meaning to do this. Tailscale was just there and easy to implement when I set my stuff up. Is it relatively simple to transition?
I mainly use Tailscale (and Zerotier) to access my CGNATED LAN, headscale will require me to pay a subscription for a VPS wouldn’t it?
I really envy the guys who say only use them because they’re lazy to open ports or want a more secure approach, I use them because I NEED them lol.
If (when?) Tailscale enshitify I’ll stick with ZT a bit until it goes the same way lol, I started using it 1st, I don’t know if ZT came before Tailscale though.
Same. I mean, I was already looking to rent a VPS, but at least there’s some time so I can save money until things get weird.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I can see value of getting a VPS, especially if you are gonna be using it for some other projects, I have had a DO instance in the past and I thinkered with WG back then BTW, but if it is only for remote accessing your home LAN, I don’t feel like paying for it tbh, especially when some users get it for free (public IPv4) and it feels even dumber for me since I have a fully working IPv6 setup!
BTW my ISP is funny, no firewall at all with it, I almost fainted when I noticed everyone could access my self hosted services with the IPv6 address and I did nothing regarding ports or whatsoever… They were fully accessible once I fired up the projects! I think I read an article about this subject… But I can’t recall when or where… I had to manually set up a firewall, which tbh, you always should do and it is especially easy to do in a Synology NAS.
Anyway, back to the mesh VPN part, if they enshitify so be it, but in the meantime we still can benefit from it.
Nerds stop recommending corporate crap: challenge: impossible
I’m unsure if it has been mentioned, but a similar tool which is open source (you can run the backend unlike tailscale), netbird
Is there an issue with Netbird’s servers at the moment? In my testing devices are connected and reach eachother, but the web admin is missing a lot of functionality compared to what’s in the docs. The peer devices section is there, but everything else, user settings, rules etc, isn’t showing/says I don’t have admin permission (of my own account… Lol?)
Honestly, no idea, worth checking their GitHub etc or their status pages if they have any
We’ve implemented netbird at my company, we’re pretty happy with it overall.
The main drawback is that it has no way of handling multiple different accounts on the same machine, and they don’t seem to have any plans for ever really solving that. As long as you can live with that, it’s a good solution.
Support is a mixed bag. Mostly just a slack server, kind of lacking in what I’d call enterprise level support. But development seems to be moving at a rapid pace, and they’re definitely in that “Small but eager” stage where everything happens quickly. I’ve reported bugs and had them fixed the same day.
Everything is open source. Backend, clients, the whole bag. So if they ever try to enshittify, you can just take your ball and leave.
Also, the security tools are really cool. Instead of writing out firewall rules by hand like Tailscale, they have a really nice, really simple GUI for setting up all your ACLs. I found it very intuitive.
Join our Discord server for a chat and community support.
Sigh…
And even worse:
Everything in Tailscale is Open Source, except the GUI clients for proprietary OS (Windows and macOS/iOS), and the control server.
everything is open source except half of all things.
Lol
To be fair, anything the GUI clients do can be done with the CLI which is still open source and on all desktop platforms and headscale is literally their open source control server.
Yea, but in iOS?
I mean is anything iOS really open source?
Tailscale never sat right with me. The convenience was nice, but - like other VC-funded projects - it followed that ever-familiar pattern of an “easy” service popping up out of nowhere and gaining massive popularity seemingly overnight. 🚩🚩🚩
I can’t say I’m surprised by any of this.
Would you rather a difficult and hard to use program?
Easy to use means people will want to adopt it, and that’s what VC companies want. Nobody wants to pay millions of dollars to make a program that nobody wants to use.
My problem isn’t directly with the programs - my problem lies with VC funding in general. Because they will come back for their money, and the project will inevitably enshittify and shove out enthusiasts in the never-ending search for infinite money.
The solution is getting rid of VC bullshit entirely. But we all know that will never happen.
would you rather …
If it means no VC, yes, without a doubt. That’s kind of the point.
I think I’ll just keep using tailscale until they start enshittifying, and then set up a Headscale instance on a VPS - no need to take this step ahead of time, right?
I mean, all the people saying they can avoid any issues by doing the above - what’s to stop Tailscale dropping support for Headscale in future if they’re serious about enshitification? Their Linux & Android clients are open source, but not IOS or Windows so they could easily block access for them.
My point being - I’ll worry when there is something substantial to worry about, til then they can know I’m using like 3 devices and a github account to authenticate. MagicDNS and the reliability of the clients is just too good for me to switch over mild funding concerns.
Yeah, as I said, it’s a friendly reminder. I’m personally probably doing it this year. It’s entirely possible that enshittification could come even years from now. It all depends on how their enterprise adoption goes I think. The more money they make there, the longer the individual users are gonna be left unsqueezed.
I just replaced my entire setup with base wireguard as a challenge, easier than I expected it to be, and not hard to mimic tailscale.
If you just have to talk from many devices to the one server sure, but Tailscale sure makes it easy for many to many. Also if a direct connection is impossible (e.g. firewall of china, CGNAT etc) tailscale puts a relay server in the middle for you.
Ok and?
And here I am, still using OpenVPN in 2025 lol
Used to run OpenVPN. Tried Wireguard and the performance was much better, although lacking some of the features some might need/want fit credential-based logins etc
I can highly recommend Netbird selfhosted, it has SSO support, logins, complex network topologies, it uses wireguard under the hood and it’s open source.
Yeah, OpenVPN definitely doesn’t have light spec requirements 😅 thankfully hardware is unfathomably powerful these days.
Sure but wireguards connection is just faster.
Good thing I deleted it from my homeserver a month ago.
Just use normal wireguard, why do you need tails or heads at all?
Accessing your home network that is kept inside a NAT by your ISP, without you having to acquire an online server somewhere.
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.
Are there better alternatives? I was planning on using tailscale until now. :P
For me personally, the next step is using Headscale - a FOSS replacement of the Tailscale control server. The Tailscale clients are already open source and can be used with Headscale.
Someone else could give other suggestions.
I use Nebula. It’s lightweight, well-engineered and fully under your control. But you do need a computer with a fixed IP and accessible port. (E.g. a cheap VPS)
You can also use “managed nebula” if you want to enjoy the same risk of the control point of your network depending on a new business ;-)
Wireguard if you’re just using it yourself. Many various ways to manage it, and it’s built in to most routers already.
Otherwise Headscale with one of the webUIs would be the closest replacement.
I decided to experiment a bit with Headscale when the wg-easy v15 update broke my chained VPN setup. Got it all set up with Headplane for a UI, worked amazingly, until I learned I was supposed to set it all up on a VPS instead and couldn’t actually access it if I wasn’t initially on my home network, oops.
I might play around with it again down the road with a cheap VPS, didn’t take long to get it going, but realistically my setup’s access is 95% me and 5% my wife so Wireguard works fine (reverted back to wg-easy v14 until v15 allows disabling ipv6 though, since that seemed to be what was causing the issues I’ve been seeing).
Why does it need to be on a VPS? It seems to work on a home network when I played around with it.
Well a VPS or an exposed service, but I feel like the latter ends up somewhat defeating the purpose anyway.
When running locally (not exposed), it worked great until I tried to make the initial connection from mobile data - can’t establish a connection to headscale if it can’t reach it in the first place. Unless I’m mistaken, the headscale service needs to be publicly accessible in some way.
Oh gotcha yes it does. Are you on CGNAT with your ISP so you can’t forward ports?
Nah, but personally I have no need to expose anything and would rather avoid the security headaches and such that come with it
Crap, I really need to switch of Tailscale but currently it is an easy way for me to access my stuff outside of home as a temporary solution while I am on a 5G modem.
I can recommend to take a look at netbird.io
Much more user friendly
Json is awful for config
Crockford is a good and smart person but he really dropped the fucking ball on JSON.
Double-quotes-only and no comments kill the whole spec for me. Extremely opinionated and dumb. I fucking hate JSON.
My boss once sent me a machine generated config. He’s terminally addicted to double-quotes (like, a fatal condition). I searched and there were 27k sequences of
\".Edit: my point is - all that compute and network wasted, every single time the file is requested and parsed. Completely pointless waste
I can’t. I tried it first and installed it on my phone from f-droid. After opening it up, it connected to an already existing network with other people’s old machines from years ago on it. I was horrified.
So then I tried to delete my whole account and couldn’t due to an error. I sent them an email about it and they took like two weeks to respond.
Netbird isn’t on F-droid
Are we talking about the same thing?
It used to be
It has never been on F-droid. I’ve been following the service since it started. It didn’t even have a mobile app not that long ago.
Do you pay for a domain? They likely provide dynamic DNS (DNS). If you’re lucky, they have an API for it, instead of an app, and you can configure a cronjob on your home server to run every 1-5 minutes (or more often, if your IP is super unstable!).
Yeah I can always do that, but putting stuff behind something like Tailscale is (or atleast feels) more secure than making my IP known to the public. I have a DMZ setup though so it should be fine.
Your “IP address” is already public. That’s why an IPv4 address is assigned to you as a “public IP address” and you NAT to a private space. When using IPv6, everything is public.
The key is to secure everything with access restrictions.
Well yes I know, but there is a difference between using a domain bound to me as a person and a random string of numbers that changes every 5 minutes
Chances are you’ve had the same public IP for a long time. Mine hasn’t changed in 2 years.
That was the case when I lived with my parents, but now it changes every 5 minutes sadly.
So I had to shut down my Minecraft server etc for now because I am on a 5G modem which makes it really annoying to open up ports and point a domain to your IP
If your IP changed every 5 minutes, you would not be able to have a voice call or anything similar. Your IP probably changes every 24 hours
@chronicledmonocle @Vinstaal0 I used to work for a dial-up ISP. Every IP is registered to an account, if you’re going through your ISP (as opposed to, say, coffee shop or hotel wifi). Though the people who have the information are different (ICANN/registrar vs your internet provider), there’s no anonymity in your home IP address even with CGNAT.
As far as your domain, you should have privacy protection enabled so people can’t find your personal info via whois.
If I host headscale on a VPS, is that as seamless of an experience as Tailscale? And would I miss out on features, like the Tailscale dashboard? How does the experience change for me (an admin type) and my users (non-technical types)?
There are some community webUIs for Headscale, headplane in particular looks pretty good: https://headscale.net/stable/ref/integration/web-ui/
I’m not sure otherwise how different the experience would be.
I actually did this instead of tailscale first; installing tailscale on a pfsense router was a challenge, iirc i had to find and install the freebsd tailscale pkg from the command line because the plugin doesn’t give the option to connect to a non-tailscale control plane.
After I did that and connected to my headscale server (on my vps) I could ping pfsense’s local ip over the tailnet, but couldn’t get any traffic out from pfsense. Turns out I had forgotten the pfsense tailscale plugin automatically sets up outbound rules for you.
That was a rabbit hole I didn’t feeling like falling down, so I turned off headscale and just used tailscale account and the normal pfsense tailscale plugin. But it’s there and it does work fine if I ever wanted to go figure out the outbound traffic rules.
