It is quite clearly stated in both this announcement and the docs [1] that it is available for the personal (aka free) plan. Not sure why their pricing plan does not include any mention of it.
Following the adage "if it's for free, you are the product", what is going on behind the scenes? Are they providing their services as a giant honey-pot to sniff on traffic?
> TL;DR: Tailscale’s free plan is free because we keep our scaling costs low relative to typical SaaS companies. We care about privacy, so unlike some other freemium models, you and your data are not the product. Rather, increased word-of-mouth from free plans sells the more valuable corporate plans. I know, it sounds too good to be true. Let’s see some details.
So it's a weighed choice between "if something seems like it's too good to be true, it often is", and "the explanations they give make good sense, and it's a way of doing business that some ethical company could choose to take".
We probably won't know in the short-to-medium term, so we'll have to take their word for it..
But I must admit, their products look pretty impressive. I'll have to have a closer look at them.
Ah, interesting, thanks. That would indeed make it a lot less costly. I would need to dive into it to get a better understanding how their service works.
Would you happen to have some good resources you found useful?
Note that the private key never, ever leaves its node. This is important because the private key is the only thing that could potentially be used to impersonate that node when negotiating a WireGuard session. As a result, only that node can encrypt packets addressed from itself, or decrypt packets addressed to itself. It’s important to keep that in mind: Tailscale node connections are end-to-end encrypted (a concept called “zero trust networking”).