> Tailscale’s free plan is free because we keep our scaling costs low relative to typical SaaS companies.

Well no, Tailscale's free plan is free because this is a user acquiring strategy (as it is described later in the article ) not because of your low cost. You could have a higher cost and still be free and typical Saas companies have the exact same reasoning than Tailscale, that's why Notion has a free plan, that's why Cloudflare has a free plan.... That's the whole point of a freemium model. What VC call product led growth.

The if you are not paying you are the product is true for free products not for freemium