There in lays my issue. I gotta cough up money monthly for a VPS, or run a public facing server from my home. Last time I did that from my house I was hacked in such a glorious manner that I swore I would never do it again. This project though is pretty amazing. If I ever have a FOSS project that I start paying for a vps service again. It is totally going on it. Thank you for sharing.

It can absolutely be on a private LAN. I access a local server on my network via Tailscale from outside the house. No public IP.

I don't think this is true. I use Tailscale on a local machine on a private LAN