Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
If I host headscale on a VPS, is that as seamless of an experience as Tailscale? And would I miss out on features, like the Tailscale dashboard? How does the experience change for me (an admin type) and my users (non-technical types)?
There are some community webUIs for Headscale, headplane in particular looks pretty good: https://headscale.net/stable/ref/integration/web-ui/
I’m not sure otherwise how different the experience would be.
I actually did this instead of tailscale first; installing tailscale on a pfsense router was a challenge, iirc i had to find and install the freebsd tailscale pkg from the command line because the plugin doesn’t give the option to connect to a non-tailscale control plane.
After I did that and connected to my headscale server (on my vps) I could ping pfsense’s local ip over the tailnet, but couldn’t get any traffic out from pfsense. Turns out I had forgotten the pfsense tailscale plugin automatically sets up outbound rules for you.
That was a rabbit hole I didn’t feeling like falling down, so I turned off headscale and just used tailscale account and the normal pfsense tailscale plugin. But it’s there and it does work fine if I ever wanted to go figure out the outbound traffic rules.