Twingate covers five users for free. Tailscale covers six. NordLayer’s cheapest configuration that includes a dedicated IP costs $95 a month, because it has a five-user minimum and a mandatory $40 server add-on.
That is the comparison, and almost nobody makes it properly because the per-user prices look close. NordLayer Core is advertised at $11 a user. At the five-user minimum it is $19 a user, and it never reaches $11 until you have roughly fifty people.
I run Ecommerce Paradise, and I want to be useful here rather than just list products. So this compares seven alternatives on what five people actually costs per month, alongside what each one is genuinely for. Prices verified against each vendor’s own pricing page in September 2026.
Stop Paying $95 a Month for Five People
NordLayer Lite drops the mandatory $40 server and costs $40 a month for the same five seats, if a fixed IP is not what you actually need.
What NordLayer Costs, So the Comparison Means Something
From NordLayer’s own pricing page: Lite is $8 a user, Core is $11 and Premium is $14, all on annual billing with a five-user minimum. Core and Premium both require a dedicated IP server at $40 a month. Lite cannot have one.
So five users on Lite is $40 a month. Five on Core is $95. There is no free trial, only a 14-day money-back guarantee.
The full tier-by-tier breakdown is in my NordLayer pricing guide.
The Seven Alternatives at Five Users
| Service and plan | Per user | Seat minimum | 5-user monthly | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Twingate Starter | Free | None | $0 | Yes, 5 users |
| Tailscale Personal | Free | None | $0 | Yes, 6 users |
| Twingate Teams | $5 | None | $25 | Upgrade path |
| GoodAccess Essential | $7 | 5 | $35 | 14-day trial |
| Tailscale Standard | $8 | None | $40 | Upgrade path |
| NordLayer Lite | $8 | 5 | $40 | No |
| NordVPN | Not per user | None | $3.49 total | 30-day refund |
1. Twingate, the One Most Small Teams Should Try First
Twingate’s Starter plan is free for 5 users and 50 resources, with peer-to-peer connections, split tunnelling and conditional access controls included. Teams is $5 a user a month for up to 100 users, adding SSO through Google Workspace and automated least-privilege policies. Business is $10 a user for up to 500 users with Okta and Entra ID integration.
The free tier is not a demo. Five users with fifty gated resources is a genuine working setup for a small store with a couple of contractors, and there is no time limit on it.
The model is different from NordLayer’s. Twingate gates access to specific resources by identity rather than routing all your traffic through a network. That is more precise and it is also more configuration, because you are defining what each person can reach rather than switching on a tunnel.
If your problem is “my contractor needs access to two internal systems and nothing else,” this is the right shape of tool and NordLayer is not.
2. Tailscale, If Anyone on the Team Is Technical
Tailscale’s Personal plan is free for up to 6 users with unlimited devices and 50 tagged resources. Standard is $8 a user a month with unlimited users and SCIM provisioning. Premium is $18 a user, adding just-in-time access and network flow logs.
Unlimited devices on the free tier is the standout. Most of these products count devices or connections, and Tailscale does not, which matters if your team has laptops, phones and a couple of servers each.
It is built on WireGuard and it assumes some comfort with networking concepts. Not developer-only, but the documentation talks to people who know what a subnet is. If nobody on your team is technical, this will feel harder than it needs to.
Standard at $8 a user matches NordLayer Lite exactly on price at five users, with no seat minimum, so a two-person team pays $16 rather than NordLayer’s $40 floor.
3. GoodAccess, the Closest Thing to a NordLayer Clone
GoodAccess is structured almost identically to NordLayer and prices slightly below it. Essential is $7 a user a month on annual billing, or $9 monthly. Premium is $11 annual, or $14 monthly. Both carry a five-user minimum, and a dedicated gateway is $49 a month.
The important structural difference is that the gateway is optional rather than required. NordLayer forces the $40 server on Core and Premium. GoodAccess lets you take the higher tier without the gateway if you do not need a fixed IP.
The second difference is the trial. GoodAccess offers 14 days free with no credit card. NordLayer offers 14 days money back, which means paying $95 up front and asking for it later.
Premium adds proper zero trust architecture, SSO and SCIM, network segmentation and SIEM integration. At $11 a user that is competitive with NordLayer Core at $11 plus the mandatory server.
If You Just Want Encrypted Browsing, Buy the Consumer Product
NordVPN is $3.49 a month on a two-year term, covers ten devices, and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee rather than fourteen.
4. NordLayer Lite, the In-Family Downgrade
Worth listing as an alternative to itself, because the saving is large and almost nobody makes the switch.
Lite is $8 a user with no dedicated IP server available. Five users is $40 a month against Core’s $95. Over a year that is $660.
You give up the fixed IP address, the cloud firewall and site-to-site connectors. You keep encrypted access, threat prevention, and the same certified infrastructure behind it.
The test is simple. Name the system that requires a fixed IP address. If it is a supplier portal or a payment processor doing IP whitelisting, you need Core. If you cannot name one, and you still need centralised control over a team, Lite does the job and you keep the $660. If you are one person, NordVPN is the cheaper answer than either.
5. NordVPN, If You Are One Person
A large share of people shopping for NordLayer actually want NordVPN and do not realise these are separate products from the same parent company.
NordVPN is $3.49 a month on a two-year term, $5.49 on one year, or $14.99 month to month. One account covers ten simultaneous devices, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee.
What you do not get is centralised team management, a dedicated IP for whitelisting, or access policies. If you have staff whose access you need to control, this is not it.
What you do get, for one person wanting encrypted connections on untrusted networks and access to region-locked tools, is the same job at four percent of NordLayer Core’s cost. I compared them properly in NordLayer vs NordVPN.
6. Cloudflare Zero Trust, Worth Pricing Yourself
Cloudflare offers a Zero Trust product with a free tier aimed at small teams, and it is a serious option that belongs in this comparison.
I could not get its pricing page to render readable figures when I checked, so I am not going to quote per-user numbers I cannot stand behind. Price it directly before comparing.
What is worth knowing regardless: this is infrastructure-grade tooling from a company whose network is a large part of the internet, and the configuration burden is correspondingly higher than a product built for non-technical buyers. If you already use Cloudflare in front of your store, adding access control there consolidates rather than adds a vendor.
7. Not Buying One, Which Is Often Correct
The seventh option is that a store with one or two people does not need a business VPN, and the security it appears to buy is mostly not the security you need.
A business VPN does not protect your Shopify admin. That is protected by a strong unique password and two-factor authentication, and an attacker with your credentials does not care which network you connected from.
It does not stop phishing, does not make you anonymous, and does not help a device that is already compromised.
What it genuinely solves is a team reaching internal systems from untrusted networks, and IP whitelisting where a supplier requires it. Until one of those is true, a password manager and two-factor authentication everywhere will do more for your actual risk than $1,140 a year of network infrastructure.
The Two Different Products in This Comparison
Half the confusion in this category comes from treating two different architectures as one product, so it is worth separating them before you choose.
The tunnel model routes your team’s traffic through a provider’s network. Everyone connects, everything goes through the tunnel, and you get an exit IP address that systems can whitelist. NordLayer and GoodAccess work this way. It is simple to explain, simple to deploy, and it is what most people picture when they hear business VPN.
The zero trust model does not route your traffic anywhere by default. It gates individual resources behind identity checks, so a contractor gets access to two specific internal systems and nothing else, with no network-wide tunnel involved. Twingate and Tailscale work this way.
The second model is better security in principle, because access is scoped per resource rather than granted at the network edge. It is also more setup, because somebody has to define what each person can reach.
Which you want depends on your actual problem. “My team needs a fixed IP so the supplier portal lets them in” is a tunnel problem. “My VA should reach the inventory system and nothing else” is a zero trust problem. Buying the wrong architecture is more expensive than buying the wrong brand.
What to Test in the First Week
Whichever you pick, four things break more often than the marketing suggests, and all of them show up quickly.
Check that your payment processor still lets you in. Some processors flag logins from new IP ranges as suspicious and will challenge or lock the session. Find this out on a Tuesday morning rather than during a sale.
Check your supplier portals. Dealer systems are frequently the least modern software you touch, and some of them behave badly behind a tunnel. If a portal breaks, you need to know before you have rolled the tool out to everyone.
Check the speed hit on a real task. Every tunnel adds latency. Uploading product images or working in a store admin over a slow connection is where you notice, not on a speed test.
Check what happens when the connection drops. Some clients fail open, meaning your traffic quietly goes out unprotected, and some fail closed and cut you off. Neither is wrong, and you should know which one you have bought.
Picking by the Reason You Are Looking
| Your situation | What to use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Two to five people, budget matters | Twingate Starter | Free for 5 users, no time limit |
| Someone technical on the team | Tailscale | Free to 6 users, unlimited devices |
| Want NordLayer’s shape, less money | GoodAccess | $7 a user, gateway optional not required |
| Happy with NordLayer, hate the price | NordLayer Lite | $40 for five seats instead of $95 |
| Actually just one person | NordVPN | $3.49 a month, ten devices |
| A supplier requires IP whitelisting | NordLayer Core | The $40 server is the thing you need |
| No team, no whitelisting requirement | Nothing yet | Two-factor authentication does more |
Where NordLayer Genuinely Wins
Two things, and they are worth paying for in the right circumstances.
The compliance paperwork is current and real. NordLayer renewed its ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification in December 2025 with no nonconformities logged. Nord Security announced in July 2026 that NordLayer had completed its SOC 2 Type II audit with no exceptions.
If a client sends you a security questionnaire, pointing at those is easier than explaining a self-hosted setup. That is a genuine business reason to pay more.
The second is that it is managed and supported rather than assembled. Twingate and Tailscale are better products in several respects and they both assume you will read documentation. NordLayer assumes you want it to work.
What This Has to Do With Running a Store
Less than the marketing in this category implies, and it is worth being clear about where the threshold sits.
You cross it when a supplier or payment processor requires IP whitelisting, when you hire someone in another country who needs access to your systems, or when a client asks how you control access to their data. In high-ticket ecommerce the first of those is the common one, because dealer portals often restrict access by address.
Before any of that, your leverage is elsewhere entirely. Getting approved with real distributors is the constraint that decides whether the business works, and the supplier outreach guide is where that starts.
If you are earlier still and choosing a category, the high-ticket niches list comes first. And the paperwork that suppliers actually ask for is covered in the business formation guide.
Build the Business Before You Buy Infrastructure for It
We handle supplier outreach, the store build and the launch, so your spend goes into the parts that produce revenue first.
How the Free Tiers Actually End
Twingate and Tailscale both have permanent free tiers rather than trials, which is unusual enough to be worth explaining, along with where they stop.
Twingate Starter ends at 5 users or 50 resources. In practice the resource count is what you hit first, because every internal system, server or service you gate counts as one. A small store gating a handful of admin tools will not get close. An agency gating client environments will.
Tailscale Personal ends at 6 users, with unlimited devices and 50 tagged resources. Additional tagged resources are $1 a month each, so the ceiling is soft rather than a hard wall. The user count is the real limit.
Both also gate the team features behind paid tiers. SSO through your identity provider, automated provisioning, device posture checks and audit logging are what you upgrade for, not raw capacity.
The honest read is that the free tiers are not loss leaders designed to trap you. They are sized for exactly the team that cannot justify paying, and they stop being enough at roughly the point where a business could afford $25 a month. That is a reasonable deal and it is better than anything NordLayer offers at the small end.
What None of These Solve
Three things people buy a business VPN hoping to fix, which it will not.
Account takeover through stolen credentials. If someone has your Shopify password and you do not have two-factor authentication on, the network you connect from is irrelevant. This is the most common way small stores actually get compromised and a VPN does nothing about it.
Phishing. A convincing email asking you to log in somewhere goes through a tunnel exactly as well as it goes through a coffee shop connection.
Compliance on its own. Having a certified access layer helps you answer a security questionnaire, and it does not make you compliant with anything by itself. If a client is asking about data handling, they are asking about more than your VPN.
The order that actually reduces risk for a small store is two-factor authentication everywhere, then a password manager, then removing access for people who have left, then network controls. Most people buy the fourth thing first because it is the one with a marketing budget.
The Verdict
For a small team that wants to test before paying, Twingate Starter is free for five users with no time limit and it is the obvious first move. Tailscale is equally good and slightly more technical, with unlimited devices on its free tier.
If you want NordLayer’s managed shape at a lower price, GoodAccess is the closest match at $7 a user with the gateway optional rather than mandatory, and it lets you trial without paying first.
If you like NordLayer and the bill is the problem, drop from Core to Lite and save $660 a year, provided you still need the centralised team management and can live without a fixed IP address.
And if you are one person who wanted encrypted browsing rather than team access control, buy NordVPN for $3.49 a month and put the other $91 somewhere it earns.
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Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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