Have a read through https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

You, and many commenters are pretty confused about out tailscale/Headscale work.

1. To a first approximation, Tailscale/Headscale don't route and traffic. They perform NAT traversal and data flows directly between nodes on the tailnet, without traversing Headscale/Tailscale directly.
2. If NAT traversal fails badly enough, it's POSSIBLE that bulk traffic can flow through the headscale/tailscale DERP nodes... but that's an unusual scenario.
3. You probably can't run Headscale from your home network and have it perform the NAT traversal functions correctly. Of course, I can't know that for sure because I don't know anything about your ISP... but home ISPs preventing Headscale from doing it's NAT traversal job are the norm... one would be pleasantly surprised to find that a home network can do that properly.
4. Are younreally expecting 10gb/s speeds over your encrypted links? I don't want to say it's impossible, people do it... but you'd generally only expect to see this on fairly burly servers that are properly configured. Tailscale just in April bragged about hitting 10gb speeds with recent optimizations: https://tailscale.com/blog/more-throughput/ and on home hardware with novice configd I'd generally expect to see roughly more like single gigabit.

For Headscale you don't need a lot of bandwidth or power because your traffic is not routed through the Headscale server. Headscale only helps to directly connect your clients together without having to open ports

$20 per month for 400mb of email + a VPN was an acceptable cost maybe in 1998, now it's insanely expensive

For tailscale, for personal use i don't see why the free plan is not enough, you need more than 3 users? ACLs can still be edited on the free plan.

And then you need to tell us why you're using the VPN. Just privacy when using unsecured wifi? Or ISP tracking paranoia? Or torrenting? By default tailscale does not route any WAN traffic, it can optionally use one of your nodes as an exit node, but that's it. You mention "leaving your desktop to be 24/7" so you don't have a server at home. If you run tailscale on the way that means the exit node will be off and you are not using a VPN. Because you're using your own connection, it does not solve ISP tracking or torrenting issues.

Maybe for you cloudflare warp is better?

Off-topic. Not about cost, but about privacy:

Considering you are using Proton, you care about digital privacy. If you are not trusting Proton, you should not trust Tailscale as well, in my opinion. Tailscale's backend is closed-source, you get no control, and nothing is stopping them from selling you data either. If you go for Headscale, you may be in a slightly better position. But websites and big companies like Google can still make detailed profile of you, as you will be connecting to everything using a single IP, that is, the IP of your VPS. But again, nobody is stopping your VPS provider from selling your data either.

Another question is that why are you paying $19 for that? They have $10-12 plans that come with 500 GB storage, emails with 3 custom domains and high-speed VPN.

Also, if you do not trust Proton, you can consider Mullvad or IVPN. They are just $5/m, and you can pay via Monero, but they do not have as many servers as Proton does.

Another question that pops in my mind is, why do you need a VPN? Do you need to connect to your services privately, or do you just need to change your IP for (relatively) better privacy? Again, paying someone with multiple VPN options is better than setting up a single VPN by yourself, in my opinion.

You might be confused about self hosting, your desktop should not be 24/7 online, you are the client and you want to use the vps as exit node, where you host also headscale. And please don't spend 20$ for a vps, you better rent 4 or more with 20$ from different providers and you can have more exists nodes. Headscale or wireguard are not eating a lot of resources. What you should look is at bandwidth , unlimited is better, you won't find many vps providers with unlimited bandwidth Even if you are behind a CGNAT using wireguard as client won't be any problems,because you are going OUT not coming IN.

Slightly off topic but what proton subscription do you have? Proton Unlimited is email + storage via Drive with 500GB and VPN for $12.99/mo if paying monthly, otherwise it’s $10/mo or $8/mo if you pay 1 or 2 years in advance, respectively.

The main thing for this is cost. I don’t really know what performance specs for a VPS I would need to reasonably have good network performance with ~10 devices, though I’m guessing I’ll have to have something =<10Gbsp. So maybe $25-$30/month depending on who I buy a VPS through?

Would EACH of your devices have their own dedicated gigabit connection to your server? Even so, are you the only user or is this for some family members also? If its just you, you can 9/10 just get a basic 5$ or less gigabit VPS. You'd much more often be limited by your outbound connection than your VPS networking, by a considerable margin. Most things you are connecting to won't saturate even a gigabit connection, so you'd be well under your bandwidth requirements.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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