Tailscale has raised $160M

>$6/user/m, but if you want to use ACLs to control anything in a workable way, it jumps 3x to $18/u/m.

It's market segmentation, needing ACLs is a sign you're at least an SMB, and to a business of nearly any actual size, the difference between $6/user and $18/user is 0.

Um, it's 3x the cost to get one feature. By your logic they should be charging $100/user/mo for the feature since that must also be the same. This is typical "enterprise" nonsense pricing and it will absolutely drive some adopters to look elsewhere.

It's a perfectly valid part of a pricing strategy to drive people away if they are not the customers you want.

Uh I work for an enterprise of tens of thousands of users and $18 a month is not nothing for us. In fact considering the discounts we get at our size that would be so high we'd never consider it.

We don't even use windows enterprise for the same reason, we have legacy office 365 plans and lifetime windows licenses without the M365 addons because it saves is a few bucks per head. At our size, a few bucks a head quickly add up to millions per year. Microsoft keeps trying to dissuade us and they even pretend office 365 plans don't exist anymore ("office 365 is now microsoft 365") but they do: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/off... . The same with their Copilot stuff. 30$ is a non starter. Our users want it but nope (and we did a trial in one big team and only 10% actually bothered to use it after the first month so I think it's more the idea of it that want rather than the actual product)

We don't use Tailscale but $6 would be feasible where $18 would be a complete nonstarter.

In fact our company is a lot more cost conscious than I am as a consumer.

All too often it's those companies that worry excessively about saving a few dollars that also have meetings for everything, glacial decision making, poor strategic focus, tons of internal politics, and so on.

At that scale, you need the "Call us" plan. No one at that scale is paying full price.

> difference between $6/user and $18/user is 0

I wouldn't go that far. Big companies put a lot of effort into saving $12/seat.

But, if you can convince them they get >$18 of value from it they're usually happy to pay. With hobbyists it's more emotional. $6 is "just a coffee" and can be justified just to try it out. At $18/m is one of your household bills, and many will decide they enjoy watching Netflix more than messing around with Tailscale.

Enterprise math is interesting --

For a global all-you-can-eat enterprise-wide rollout:

* base: 20K users x $200/yr

* 50% discount: volume + multi-year + ...

=> enterprise: $1M/yr

=> 200 person division in the enterprise: $10K/yr

It's not cheap, but averaging out a global rollout, not terrible afaict

(This is super rough. Ex: Add in BYO hardware, internal staffing, pro serv, and who knows the real discounting!)

Some of that we have, yes. Glacial decision making definitely. Internal politics crap too. Meetings not so bad though (and especially flying all over the world for business meetings is heavily frowned upon since 2015 which is great because I always hated that)

Strategy is pretty good I think. And they are also not backing down on inclusivity and sustainability despite the threats from Trump (companies with inclusivity aren't allowed to do business with the US govt blahblah). We're an EU company but this worried me a bit (I'm heavily involved in the inclusivity program). But they've already said they are absolutely not giving in on that point.

Yeah no idea of the discounts there nor of how much we spend on our current VPN provider (I don't work in that team). I guess for a VPN they might have higher spending limits as a VPN is always required to be on on all of our endpoints.

It's zero for small businesses with a dozen employees. The moment you have a large business you run into an obvious problem: only a subset of your employees actually use the software, but if even a single user needs a higher tier you have to upgrade all users.

I have been using ZeroTier for a few years with great success. It’s not an Enterprise, but for my lil’ shop I get 100 endpoints for $0.10/ea/month, and that includes all features.

Namely, customers too stupid to know how to use something else, and/or customers you’ve managed to lock-in sufficiently to make them too scared to do so. I guess that’s a good strategy if you hate what you do and the people you do it for.

>> Uh I work for an enterprise of tens of thousands of users and $18 a month is not nothing for us. In fact considering the discounts we get at our size that would be so high we'd never consider it.

This doesn't make sense to me. It shouldn't matter if you are a small company or a large one, a few bucks per person per month is noise. I get trying to leverage scale to get a better price, but if something saves time / money, a company shouldn't refuse it just because they are large. Whoever is gatekeeping these decisions is ultimately eroding the company's value.

My 100ish person company the differnnce was using and not using between those prices. 18 a month for acls is insane