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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
Good thing I deleted it from my homeserver a month ago.
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
Are there better alternatives? I was planning on using tailscale until now. :P
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.
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
Yeah, OpenVPN definitely doesn’t have light spec requirements 😅 thankfully hardware is unfathomably powerful these days.
Sure but wireguards connection is just faster.
Just came here to say that the guy looks like a creep!
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
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
I never really understood the point of using Tailscale over plain ol’ WireGuard. I mean I guess if youve got a dozen+ nodes but I feel like most laymens topologies won’t be complex beyond a regular old wireguard config
NAT punching and proxying when a p2p connection between any 2 nodes cannot be achieved. It’s a world of difference with mobile devices when they always see each other, all the time. However, headscale does all that.
Same thing here, either tailscale selfhosted or Netbird selfhosted I’d the way to go for all the nice features, having the free tier or tailscale for personal data never sounded right to me.
Wireguard doesn’t do NAT/Firewall traversal nor does it have SSO
Tailscale manages the underlying Wireguard for you. I would be great if Wireguard had native NAT traversal but that isn’t the case.
Simplicity?
I mean sure, but I don’t think it’s simpler than setting up a wireguard config IMO. For tailscale you gotta make an account, register devices, connect them. Feel like wireguard is about the same except you don’t have to make an account.
