Huge fan. I've always been curious, but never reached out; Is there any way for people to host their own controller for free for non commercial endeavours? I'd love to get more hands on experience with how the software I love so much actually works.

Yes, you just have to control it via its JSON API. The only real non-free thing we have is the control panel GUI.

A very satisfied user of Zerotier myself. Big thanks!

We are a 3 people distributed team, with a bunch of machines in various inhospitable environments. We needed to connect to each other, without a full on VPN due to the performance issues. Also, we needed to access these random machines we have (some of them are just arm boards in remote locations with unreliable wifi).

Zerotier came as a life saver. The other folks are not very tech savvy (in the sense of being able to configure VPNs, manage bastion hosts, etc). When I enabled ZT for them, one of them commented: "this is science fiction. zero to connected in under a minute, without any mumbo-jumbo".

You (and your team) have done a great job at building this!

Never heard of you before this

Going to give it a spin. Seems a lot better than OpenVPN for client to office communication.. is this reasonable use case for it, or am I misusing zero tier?

That's a perfect use for it, actually.