What other benefits are there? I use a PiHole to block ads on my phone already, but I do it via a PiHole installed on an EC2 instance that I also use as an IRC bouncer and other things.
It may be cheaper to VPN to home vs a cloud server, and you may avoid issues where sites block AWS. You can also securely forward other ports. Sometimes I print or access other services in my house that aren’t internet safe.
At home on my desktop, I just use uBlock Origin in my browser.
And the EC2 instance I installed it on was already being used for other toy projects, so it's not like it cost me anything. The additional egress bandwidth is likely fractions of a penny.
Headscale [1] allows one to implement a self-hosted, open source alternative to the Tailscale control server.
[1] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
Almost all of tailscale is opensourced at this point besides the GUI.
You can connect one person on a free plan, but each person can have their own free plan that you share devices between.