It’s pretty similar as far as how it works for you.

It may be cheaper to VPN to home vs a cloud server, and you may avoid issues where sites block AWS. You can also securely forward other ports. Sometimes I print or access other services in my house that aren’t internet safe.

I have the PiHole VPN configured so that only DNS lookups go through it. All other traffic is not tunneled. It means I don't get billed for several gigabytes of traffic from AWS and my traffic doesn't come from an AWS IP, but I still get all the ad-blocking benefits of a PiHole.

At home on my desktop, I just use uBlock Origin in my browser.

oh wow that is cool. I have never heard or thought about putting a pi-hole in the cloud.

It made more sense to me for using a PiHole on my phone. I didn't want to expose a VPN port on my home network, and didn't want to deal with trying to tunnel VPN through SSH.

And the EC2 instance I installed it on was already being used for other toy projects, so it's not like it cost me anything. The additional egress bandwidth is likely fractions of a penny.

It means you can self host all kinds of things and never worry about opening a port on your router.

As long as you don't need to share any of your services with non-Tailscale users. Otherwise you'll need to set up some sort of public server.

But you can also try to get them to be Tailscale users and effortlessly share the devices with access control features they built. I share my home servers and game servers with family/friends easily while still keeping everything off the public internet.

But now your friends and family are locked into a proprietary system, subject to whatever the future incentives of Tailscale end up being. How many people can you connect on the free plan?

Yea, but my friends and family would rather have a service that just works, has apps, etc instead of an open one. Tailscale is a good actor ~for now~ and ~for now~ thats good enough for us. Not everyday in every situation can I be an activist. I have a list of alternatives incl FOSS ones should I need, but I'll cross that bridge only if I need to, since this JustWorks.

You can connect one person on a free plan, but each person can have their own free plan that you share devices between.

Everything in Tailscale is Open Source, except the GUI clients for proprietary OS (Windows and macOS/iOS), and the control server.

Headscale [1] allows one to implement a self-hosted, open source alternative to the Tailscale control server.

[1] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

Almost all of tailscale is opensourced at this point besides the GUI.

Does headscale do all the same NAT traversal that Tailscale is capable of?