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Comment by Tenkuru | Hacker News Reader

Reposting my comment from Reddit: Honestly, I’m a bit torn. On the one hand, I’m personally thrilled that the free plan now includes 6 seats, which is perfect for my home setup and honestly more than I expected.

On the other hand, it likely means I’ll lose the ability to use Tailscale at work. We’re a small startup with 8 people in our Tailnet, though only about half are active in a given month. Right now we’re paying somewhere between $6 to $12 depending on usage, but if I’m reading the new pricing correctly, that jumps to $64 a month. That’s a pretty steep increase for us.

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Do you think the cost of evaluating replacements, agreeing on one, and switching all people and processes to this new tool would cost this startup more or less than 600$ this year? After how many years would that work break even at 600$/year?

I swag this work to take:

1 engineer 8 hours to honestly evaluate alternatives, their licenses, the likelihood they will move towards a similar model in the next ~3 years, number of stars on GitHub, etc

2+ engineers 2 hours to agree on the path forward

1 engineer 2 hours to implement to new solution

8 engineers 1 hour to switch to the new solution

1 engineer 1 hour to finalize the removal of the old solution

I’ll call it 24 hours of work total, how much are you paying your engineers? Let’s say an easy 100$/hr. At this rate, it would cost $2400 and take 4 years to break even on doing this work (assuming the new solution has feature parity at the old 12$/month rate)

If I was tailscale doing this math, I would bet your startup is not gunna do this work to migrate away from tailscale right now because of this price increase.

This is exactly why I will never create a business that sells to developers. Some of the highest paid individuals on the planet cannot fathom paying for tools that make their life easy.

I get there are lots of tools that all add up, but even paying an extra $2,000/yr per dev isn't really that much for the time savings. But for some reason we're fickle, we think things should be cheaper than a daily coffee because "we can create this ourselves".

> Some of the highest paid individuals on the planet cannot fathom paying for tools that make their life easy.

I get where you're coming from, but you do realize that developers aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions, right?

Yeah, my work is in a very similar boat. We might need to drop our Tailscale usage because of this. It sucks.

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