Hey folks. As a solo developer who's been running a Twingate setup for the last three months, I wanted to share my hands-on experience, since the pricing and feature set is often discussed for teams, but less so for individuals.
My core use case is secure access to a home lab, a couple of cloud VPS instances, and a Raspberry Pi, from any location. I was tired of maintaining VPN configs and dealing with open ports. The setup was straightforward—the Twingate connector on a small cloud VM, and the client on my devices. Having everything behind a zero-trust model, where each resource is explicitly defined, felt immediately cleaner and safer. The admin console is intuitive, which is a big plus when you're your own IT department.
The real value for me has been in the daily workflow. I can access my services by name without thinking about IPs or ports, and the split tunneling works flawlessly for keeping general traffic off the tunnel. The performance is noticeably better than my old OpenVPN setup for TCP-based services. However, I did hit a small snag with a UDP-based service that required a tweak in the resource configuration, but their docs covered it.
So, is it worth the cost for a solo dev? For me, yes, but with a caveat. The free tier is generous for personal use (up to 5 users and 10 devices covers me easily), but if you need more than that, the jump to the paid tier is steep for one person. The time saved on maintenance and the security posture it provides outweighs the cost for my peace of mind, but if your needs are very simple, a simpler solution might suffice.
I'm curious—are any other solo developers or very small shops using it? How does it fit into your workflow?
Keep it civil, keep it real.