I think it was initially 5 before they upped it to 100. They said they initially assumed they'd have tons of people using the subnet routing to share more than the limited number of devices, but found that wasn't the case so they upped the free accounts

[–] ouch 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Bait and switch. Stay tuned for enshittification.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh yeah I fully expect it at some point in the future. Right now their business model appears to be "get the nerds hooked on using it on their personal stuff to see how awesome it is to then sell enterprise licenses" and they're in the "establish growth" phase so I think there's a few years before enshitification begins.

There is a competitor called Netbird that does similar and is fully open source and self-hostable. I haven't tried it yet but it looks good on (virtual) paper

[–] ouch 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks for the Netbird link, wasn't aware of it.

If I'm not badly mistaken it's also possible to self host Tailscale. For example:

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

I haven't tried either. Probably should at some point, but I haven't really found a use case yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

By my memory of what I read headscale is a reverse engineered backend using the official tailscale client, so more opportunities for breakage or the weird issues that come from a reverse engineered server with a stock closed source client. I also could be horribly misinformed and/or misremembering