Hi everyone! New here, and still figuring out all this network stuff. 😅
I'm helping set up a small remote sales team (we use Salesforce, if that matters). We're looking at secure ways for the team to connect to our internal tools.
I keep seeing Perimeter 81 and Tailscale mentioned. One thing I don't really get is bandwidth limits. Does Perimeter 81 have caps on their plans? I can't seem to find a clear answer on their site. For Tailscale, I think it's free up to a point, then you pay for more users, right?
Could someone explain how the bandwidth or data transfer works for each? I just want to make sure our team won't hit a surprise wall if they're on video calls or uploading large files.
Hey user46, I'm a senior dev at a SaaS company with about 50 people, mostly remote. We've used both Perimeter 81 and Tailscale in production over the last two years for connecting developers and support staff to our internal AWS and on-prem resources.
Here's the real breakdown on bandwidth and the bigger picture:
1. **Target Audience & Model:** Perimeter 81 is built for security-minded companies (like fintech or healthtech) who want a traditional VPN-as-a-service with a management console. Tailscale is for tech teams that want a zero-config, peer-to-peer mesh network, where your devices talk directly if they can.
2. **Real Pricing:** Tailscale's free tier gives you 1 user + 100 devices, which is misleading for a sales team; you'll need a paid seat per person. Their "Business" plan starts at $10/user/month billed annually. Perimeter 81's pricing is less public, but expect $8-12/user/month on a yearly commitment, with minimum seat counts (often 10-20). The hidden cost with P81 is that you pay for egress bandwidth overages on most plans.
3. **Bandwidth Caps:** This is your key difference. Perimeter 81's lower-tier plans often have data transfer caps (e.g., 50GB or 200GB per month per *gateway*, not per user). Exceed that, and you pay overage fees or hit throttling. You must ask their sales directly. Tailscale has **no bandwidth caps or limits** on any paid plan; your limit is just the underlying internet connections of your devices/servers.
4. **Deployment Effort:** For your Salesforce team, Perimeter 81 requires you to set up "gateways" (in the cloud or on-prem) and manage access policies. It's a few hours of setup. Tailscale is install-and-forget on a laptop; you share a single network "tag" with your team. The bigger lift with Tailscale is if you need "subnet routers" or "exit nodes" to reach non-Tailscale company resources.
I'd pick **Tailscale** for your use case of a remote sales team needing simple, secure access to internal web tools. It's cheaper overall, has no surprise bandwidth bills from video calls, and they'll be connected in minutes. The only reasons to choose Perimeter 81 are if you need deep, granular access logging for compliance (like SOC2), or your team is non-technical and you need a "client" that forces all traffic through a company gateway for filtering. If you can tell us whether you need to log *all* web traffic, or if you have on-prem file servers that aren't cloud-hosted, the choice becomes even clearer.
Prompt engineering is the new debugging
That's a great question. I was also worried about hitting a surprise cap because our team sometimes pulls large analytics files. From what I finally found buried in their FAQ, Perimeter 81 doesn't throttle or cap bandwidth on any of their main plans. They seem to have "fair use" policies, but it's not a hard limit you'll hit with normal use like video calls.
For Tailscale, you're right. The free tier is generous for devices, but you pay per user for the team features. The bandwidth itself isn't limited, but on the free plan you're using their public relays, which can get slow. You'd need a paid plan for faster direct connections. The surprise for a sales team might be the per-user cost adding up, more than a bandwidth cap. Hope that helps a bit
One step at a time
You've hit on the exact point that often gets lost in their marketing copy.
> I can't seem to find a clear answer on their site
That's because Perimeter 81's model is more about selling "seats" and "gates" (their connector instances). They don't advertise hard bandwidth caps because their architecture, being a centralized VPN service with regional egress points, naturally creates a shared-resource environment. The constraint isn't a terabyte limit on a dashboard; it's that all your team's traffic is funneling through their infrastructure, and performance will degrade under heavy load in ways they'll call "fair use." You're paying for the convenience of their managed ingress/egress, not for raw bytes transferred.
Tailscale's model is inverted. The bandwidth "cost" isn't on their balance sheet; it's on your own infrastructure bill. If your sales team is connecting directly to a company resource (like a file server in your office), the traffic flows peer-to-peer and doesn't touch Tailscale's infrastructure at all. The only time you consume their "bandwidth" is when you use a Tailscale *relay* (DERP) because a direct connection can't be established. That's what the free tier leans on heavily, and it can indeed feel sluggish. The paid plan's primary benefit for performance is enabling direct connections and your own private DERP relays, moving the bandwidth cost and capacity planning squarely to you.
So for video calls and large files, the surprise wall with Perimeter 81 is potential congestion at their gateways. With Tailscale, the wall is the free tier forcing you onto their public, shared relays. The financial surprise for Tailscale is the per-user cost, but the performance surprise for Perimeter 81 is the lack of control over the network path.
metrics over vibes