It’s not really a competing product until they relaunch it with a heavy consumer focus and with some of the properties that Tailscale has, ie: avoiding going through the cloudflare CDN. But more to my point, cloudflare is definitely in a position to outcompete Tailscale, it’s just a couple tweaks and a marketing shift.
I don't think Tailscale will focus on the consumer market, I'd be very surprised at least if they did. I think they built a developer-friendly product to get mindshare and early adoptors, but eventually the real market for such such products is in the B2B space, i.e. implementing the "BeyondCorp" model of zero-trust networking. There's also a market for building cloud mesh services but I'm not sure if Tailscale is well positioned for that as there are good open-source solutions available for that already.
You're not wrong but they do seem to want to keep focusing on consumers (not just developers), teams, and enterprises all at the same time but market [0] the product differently.
> If we're going to fix the Internet, there's no point only fixing it for big companies who can pay a lot. That misses the point of the whole adventure. The Internet is for everyone. We have to fix it for everyone, or why bother? We knew we had to design a business model and a technical architecture that removes any incentive to abuse your privacy. Providing an ever-expanding free tier is how we help as many people as possible.
> ...
> Tailscale's go-to-market strategy is what we call bottom-up growth, or product-led growth (PLG). An earlier name for this is "GTM 3.0", which is explained beautifully in a presentation by Adam Gross... To summarize: in GTM 3.0, you give away an unlimited free tier for individual use (Not a trial, a free tier; this is what makes it different from GTM 2.0). Then, for collaboration in small teams, you charge a bit. Then, for big company control and auditability, you charge even more. At each level, the value proposition is different, so that users use your tech differently and benefit differently from it. And at each level, the buyer is different, so the messaging is different.
They already (sort of) do [0] as they have a "Personal Pro" plan that's not too obvious - personally, I hope they expand to make it more cloud-native via a la carte pricing for those users as I'd pay an extra $x/month for an additional subnet router or three. And, IMO, it's a smart approach - those who are the targeted "Prosumer" might leverage this for their homelab and carry it over with them into the enterprise. I say that it's a smart approach because in my time at a vendor that was slinging security middle boxes - we used to give away our small form factor product to those homelab'ers for free. They'd take them home and see how much the solution could provide, they got comfortable with the UI, and they learned it for their own use cases. And then the path into an enterprise conversation held much less friction.
I remember Astaro did this with their Astaro Security Gateway UTM solution. Provide a full featured software appliance for home users and hope the admins are so caught up that they don't want to change to another vendor at work. Astaro got acquired by Sophos in 2011 but I just checked, they still offer the Sophos UTM Gateway in a Home edition.
I think they've said they don't actually enforce the usage limits, so you can add an additional subnet router and they largely don't care (because they haven't put the engineering into enforcing the limits, because it doesn't actually use up appreciably more resources for them when you exceed those limits). I think they do enforce the user limits though.
It costs them so little to provide their free consumer service (iirc: they fall-back to providing transit, but it’s very rare and only occurs when UDP is completely blocked) that it benefits them to keep their focus on consumers because if everyone is using Tailscale, the business customers are inevitable.
