Depends on whether you're talking about stuff that you actually want to be "exposed to the public" (i.e. can receive traffic from any IP) or just "accessible from outside the LAN."

If the former, Tailscale isn't really a good fit since it only permits access to authenticated devices.

If the latter, Tailscale is perfect. It's a VPN in the original sense of the world, "private" being the operative term - your devices can communicate as if they were all on the same LAN, without worrying about their traffic being eavesdropped.

As for the pricing, I'm fairly confident that Tailscale won't mind if you're sharing a free plan (so single-user) across e.g. your laptop and your wife's, even though there are technically two "users" there. They've made it pretty clear that the divide they care about is "personal use free, company use paid."