Tailscale

$0.01. That’s what my first full test session of on-demand US VPN cost — a cloud server created in ~35 seconds, up for a quarter of an hour, destroyed in 22 seconds. Billing rate while it exists: $0.006 an hour. Billing rate when it doesn’t: zero.

No VPN subscription, no always-on VPS, no shared commercial VPN IP that every streaming service has already blacklisted. The whole setup — four Terraform resources, a hardened cloud-init bootstrap, a Tailscale policy and a Makefile wrapper — was built in a single evening with an AI coding agent (GLM-5.3 via OpenCode).

In my previous post, I shared how to install Home Assistant OS (HAOS) inside a KVM on a Raspberry Pi 5. While having a powerful local server is great, it brings up a major question: How do you access it securely from the outside?

For this setup, I wanted to achieve two specific goals:

1. Enable a free and secure VPN for my mobile device (so I can surf safely on public Wi-Fi).
2. Gain seamless remote access to Home Assistant without exposing any ports to the internet.

The answer to both is Tailscale.