Except you do need to acquire an online server somewhere, its just one that tailscale owns and controls instead of you, and when tailscale decides to enshittify and kill of their free tier you’ll be left wondering why you didn’t just rent a cheap VPS sooner.

Ask yourself, what is tailscale getting out of those “free” users that makes it worth providing services to them that they’d otherwsie need to rent a VPS for? What do you think their response would be if for example they got pressured about maybe too many users on their network are running a certain video streaming app?