Comment by sheepscreek
4 hours ago
Not trying to diss or anything but a capable engineer could spin this up within their organization in a day or two. So I’m not sure how useful this is going to be to the average customer. Perhaps to the largest customers who have sophisticated security and compliance needs but even for them this would need to be very very competitively priced to be worthwhile (cheaper than the salary of 2 devs for a year).
The true moat of Tailscale is the core product. That can’t be easily replicated (still). Perhaps some product to simplify controlling what resources agents in the organization have access to and having 100% visibility + audatability for them will be way more useful.
I built a similar gateway for my own stack and thought it would be a quick project, but the complexity is hidden in the details. A basic proxy is simple enough, but getting accurate token counts for streaming responses turned out to be a huge pain since every provider handles chunks differently. You also end up spending a lot of time writing adapters to unify the schemas so your application logic stays clean. If you care about precise billing or logging, it is definitely not a two day build.