Hacker News Reader

I believe Tailscale is free to use for small home setups. It's limited to 3 users and 100 devices which has been plenty for my homelab setup.

This, or simply expose a VPN (Wireguard) port on a public IP. I don't see why you need to involve any third parties in such a setup.

For a single machine, yeah Wireguard is fine. For my multi-user multi-machine many-service home lab, it’s quite helpful to have the extra small features that Headscale offers (and some it exposes in a more convenient way).

Edit: Tailscale has a fairly frank page on Wireguard vs Tailscale with suggestions on when to use which: https://tailscale.com/compare/wireguard

Pangolin is also a good choice. Can be fully self-hosted. Also based on WireGuard.

Handles both browser-based reverse proxy access and client-based P2P connections like a VPN.