This should be excellent for selfhosters that have all their services in one VM. I haven’t tried this myself, but I think this means you can:
- you can create memorable links instead of memorizing port numbers:
jellyfin.foo-bar.ts.net - share one service from a machine instead of all of them in a more intuitive way
If you’re new to Tailscale Services, it lets you publish internal resources like databases, APIs, and web servers as named services in your tailnet, using stable MagicDNS names. Rather than connecting to individual machines, teams connect to logical services that automatically route traffic to healthy, available backends across your infrastructure. This decoupling makes migrations, scaling, and high availability far easier, without reconfiguring clients, rewriting access policies, or standing up load balancers. Our documentation has details on use cases, requirements, and implementation.
Would it make you feel better if you paid Tailscale for one of their plans? It’s not like they are just giving away their whole enterprise. It’s fairly trivial for them to give free services, kind of like Cloudflare, Oracle, et al. Reading a bit reveals:
That seems pretty profitable. Enshitification happens. It’s been going on since I was born. If it’s free on the internet, and later it becomes a paid service, then I just find something else that fits. Or pony up the cheapest plan they have, which currently is their Personal Plus @ $5 USD per month. I don’t mind paying for a good service and $5 USD is burger from McDonalds. Extremely well under what most people put into a hobby. Will prices increase? Maybe…everything goes up. Rarely do services and utilities go down in price. When the price points are no longer justifiable, again, I look for something else that fits.
There’s also Netbird, worth checking out.
I’ve heard great things about Netbird. There are all manner of choices. Their team plan @ $5 USD looks rather generous for homelab operation.
That’s one way to look at it. I used to look at paid VC-funded services like that. I no longer do as I’ve observed services I paid good money for get more expensive much faster than inflation and decrease in quality and features at the same time. It’s one reason I self-host many services I used to pay third parties for. I now look to alternatives from the get go and derisk existing dependencies. To be clear - profitability isn’t merely the only problem. The ownership and its profit growth strategy (and expectations) are. Those are not the same in a decades old ISP and a VC-funded startup.
Merely being profitable today isn’t a good predictor for stable prices and function over the long run for VC-funded services. I’m not planning to do major surgery to my setup every few years as yet another service shits the bed. The workstation/server where my self-hosted services run has last been reinstalled in 2014. Most of my config-as-code was written in 2019. I support a few families with this and I aim at maximum stability with minimal maintenance. So I use open source whenever I can and I often pay for development. I only integrated Tailscale in my setup because the clients are open source and because there’s an open source server option.
I’m not saying to people - don’t use Tailscale. In fact I often recommend it to new self-hosters. But I do that because there’s a way out. So here I’m reminding people who care about a way out to check if this feature is escapable. :D