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Comment by gilbertbw | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big Tailscale proponent, implementing it at work in early 2020. But for us I'm not sure this is great news. We have a small Tailnet of 5 users, paying $30 for the Team plan. If we went for Starter we'd save $18, but loose a lot of cool things Tailscale has come out with recently that we have been looking at, like user/group level ACLs, ACL Gitops,Tailscale SSH and Tailscale Funnel.

Alternatively we'd pay $36 for (3 free, 2 * $18) for Premium, which doesn't sound too bad. But the cost for each new user would be three times higher than it currently is (and Tailscale our most expensive SAAS product per person).

Or we stick to legacy pricing for now, and live with things like the Subnet Router limit which makes e.g. connecting home VoIP phones to the Tailnet price prohibitive.

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So they used to have a $6/month/user plan that included Funnel and SSH, but now they moved those to the $18/month/user plan? That doesn't sound great, and it's disappointing that that's not even mentioned in the article

Yeah. I had a feeling of dread when I saw the "Changes to your Tailscale plan" email subject, but then was positively surprised by many of the changes. For smaller companies, getting the first three users for free will also be nice.

Previously almost all features were available [0] on all plans, though with certain restrictions that made sense (and some that didn't). I was hitting those limits and wanted to get approval for us to purchase the Team plan.

But now I see that features have been stripped out of the "new" Team plan — and was also frustrated that I couldn't find any information on this. I guess overall the pricing structure makes sense for them, but it's frustrating to not have this clearer in their article.

I suppose I can live without things like Funnel and SSH, and don't need Okta etc., but paying the new ACL tax for Starter to Premium (a $12 jump per user) is more painful.

Overall a positive, but with rough edges which unfortunately hurt me. But perhaps there'll be some tweaks in future, and perhaps again the opportunity to pay for individual feature upgrades.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230417141600/https://tailscale...

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I'm kinda confused about things like SSH and Funnel being moved to the Premium tier.

It feels a little odd that the Free tier lets you use Premium features indefinitely, but as soon as you get more colleagues onboard, you lose those features.

Unless you're looking carefully at the pricing page, you'd miss that Starter has many fewer features compared to Free.

I'm in the same boat, ssh is our most used feature, also quite an odd decision to give the free plan more features than the Starter.

Yeah, I thought the webpage was broken when I saw it! :D

I can understand that things like SSH and Funnel cost more, since they actually interact with their server infrastructure… but the removal of features and ACLs from Starter wasn't well communicated.

This is weird, currently I'm using the Free plan but I always wanted to upgrade to financially help Tailscale, but now that the Starter plan doesn't have SSH and Funnel, it would make more sense to stay on the Free plan instead.

It doesn't even make any sense, if it is available on the Free plan, why not give it to the Starter plan too?

Also, I may be misunderstanding the billing page, but it looks like Tailscale removed soft limits? On my billing page, it shows "Your tailnet has 3 more users than you are paying for. That’s fine, we have soft limits. Play around and upgrade your plan before April 30th 2024."

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