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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Its not great for family because the free tier is limited to one user.

It's also not super great for some workplaces because tailscale kinda...gets superpowers in your network.

It is definitely something smaller companies are using though.

It's fine for families with the sharing nodes feature[0]. My family and I use it for a few services hosted on different machines in different locations (Jellyfin, Home Assistant, and some others).

It's an easy way to get remote access to services when away from home, or when the family lives in different homes but wants to share services. I wrote a guide explaining how to set up remote access for Jellyfin using Tailscale[1], which may illustrate the use case.

[0]: https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/ [1]: https://www.ethanmad.com/post/jellyfin_remote_access/

> It's also not super great for some workplaces because tailscale kinda...gets superpowers in your network. It is definitely something smaller companies are using though.

There are banks [1] using Tailscale. If their security concerns can be addressed, I'm sure it can work for pretty much any company.

[1] https://tailscale.com/customers/versabank/

Tailscale may have given them a custom solution. If not it'd be pretty irresponsible to run it the way tailscale runs right now in a banking situation.

How's that? Lots of banks use, for instance, hosted Okta as their source of truth for all authentication.

You think banking cyber-security is waaaay better than it actually is. Many don't offer 2FA and require password lengths that can be cracked in less than a week on decade old hardware.

Having one user isn't really that bad of a limitation for a family, just share the login. Unless you want to prevent certain family members from accessing certain devices at a network level for some reason.

They limit it to auth providers, so I don't know if that'd be the best thing.

https://login.tailscale.com/start

It ties to OAuth logins (Google, github), that doesn't fit soo well with "just share login", although you could make a dedicated Github account just for it I guess.

Ah yeah forgot about that part, I do have a throw away google account used for these things

They have a "Community on GitHub" plan¹ that's free if you're using it either for an open-source project, or "to interconnect your own friends and family". It does mean your friends & family have to use GitHub to authenticate though, but that seems like a pretty small restriction.

¹https://tailscale.com/kb/1154/free-plans/

They address that in their pricing page (and linked article):

> The Community on GitHub plan can get you up to 25 users, 5 devices per user, and 2 admins for free.

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