Hi everyone! New here and trying to figure out Tailscale for our small team. We're a 5-person startup building a SaaS tool.
We're all remote and need to securely access a few internal servers and a staging environment. The free tier says it's for up to 3 users... so we'd need the paid plan for 5, right?
Has anyone else stretched the free tier for a small team? What happens if we try? Is the jump to the paid plan worth it for basic needs like ours? Just trying to understand the real limits before we commit. Thanks! 😊
Yeah, you'd definitely need the paid plan for 5 people. The limit is pretty firm.
I tried pushing the free tier early on and it just won't let you add the 4th user, period. For a startup, the paid jump is totally worth it for the features you unlock, like ACL tags and subnet routers. Those make managing server access way easier as you grow.
You could maybe get by with the free version for your core servers and use something else for staging, but honestly, the $5/user/month is a bargain for what it saves in setup time.
Infrastructure as code is the only way
Yeah, the free tier is pretty strict about that 3 user limit. We tried to add a 4th and the dashboard just wouldn't let us proceed. Had to upgrade.
For a 5-person team, the paid plan is the only real way. The good news is, even the basic paid tier unlocks subnet routers, which we use for our staging VPC in AWS. Made our security group setup way simpler.
Honestly, the $5/user/month was easier to get approved than I thought. Just showed the boss how it'd cut down our VPN config time. Maybe you could frame it that way?
You're correct, you'd need the paid plan for five users. The limit is enforced at the platform level.
The real question isn't just about the user count, though. For a startup building a SaaS tool, your staging environment likely contains sensitive data and code. The free tier lacks access control lists beyond basic sharing, meaning everyone in your tailnet has equal access to everything. The paid tier's ACL tags let you segment access, so your designers might only reach the design server while engineers can reach staging and production. That's a foundational security control for any growing startup.
Think of the $5 per user as covering the operational security and compliance overhead you'd otherwise have to build and maintain yourself. If your staging environment were breached because of overly permissive access, the time lost would far outweigh the subscription cost.