Historically, we’ve found that their tunnels have really high latency variance. For example something that’s normally 30-50ms to ec2 is now 115ms-750ms
This requires no port forwarding, so someone brute force scanning your IP won't find this and your open port. they also might have a harder time figuring out what service has been exposed since the port number itself will be unknown.
This is handy, but I wonder how much it will cannibalize their services. I have a simple app deployed on cloudflare for a very niche single purpose use, but I wouldn't have bothered if I had this. Serving it from my own machine would have been fine.
My initial thought was desktops generally run 24/7, with laptops running when in use. At least for the customer at the market intersection for this type of product.
I often tell my dev colleagues to avoid having their PC turned on all the time, be it because of the electricity bill cost, environmental impact or simply to make the longevity of the hardware a little longer. Granted almost everyone just ignores those things even if they're conscious of it, so I'd say you're right
Maybe it's a nice way to quickly test a new service or change over the internet without going through the git process, same way one would use ngrok - I could see that being helpful when prototyping / pocs, etc - before deploying changes to your app via the proper channel, especially if you are already using cloudflare for your domains/apps. As other people said, it probably would not be practical or scalable for most people to run an app 24/7 from their laptop using their home or office internet connection.
Tunneling was something that recently fell out of the work I've been doing [1]. I've used Cloudflare Tunnels before but I just have low trust with them recently with how big they are getting. All of these nice things come at the cost of pushing _a lot_ of traffic through their systems.
Yeah, I don't doubt their infrastructure at all. In fact, I rate them fairly high in terms of reliability and performance. I've honestly been a fan of them for a very long time - it's just I'm watching all of this centralization happen and it sets my Spidey sense off. Like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
They see all the traffic in cleartext. Plus you have to trust them not to maliciously alter your traffic. As a US company, their options may be limited if they are coerced by their government to do so.
Reality check - you are not pushing “_a lot_” of traffic relative to any hyperscaler or large scale CDN. They push hundreds of Tbps sustained. You don’t peak at a few Mbps.
They can monitor extreme outliers. It’s not an issue for them.
In hindsight, that was probably a confusing sentence. I was more pointing out how much traffic flows trough their systems which ends up making it an attractive honeypot, especially as a U.S. company.
Cloudflare want you to push traffic through their systems. This is yet another traffic generator to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product viz. the enterprise DDoS protection.
Yes they actually do, but because its cloudflare which is offering this, blacklisting it might lead to blacklisting can be more negative and cloudflare has a much higher incentive to not make these tunnels useless. They are also more powerful and can fix things which would be harder for smaller companies to handle (atleast within the context of cloudflare tunnels)
Can confirm. Coming from ngrok, the main reason we had to make tunneling not anonymized etc was because of scammers, etc on the internet. Other players in the space bypass this by open sourcing the tech, or separating the architecture entirely. This is cool and all, but ultimately gives nefarious actors on the internet more opportunities.
These are the limitations mentioned on the docs [1]. Quick Tunnels are subject to a hard limit on the number of concurrent requests that can be proxied at any point in time. Currently, this limit is 200 in-flight requests. If a Quick Tunnel hits this limit, the HTTP response will return a 429 status code. Quick Tunnels do not support Server-Sent Events (SSE).
If your a hobbiest or dev just testing your services, it makes more sense to utilize onion services imho.
It does the exact same thing, except supported by a global network of volunteers around the world.
Sure, you get some latency, but this is actually ideal for testing. You should know how your service operates in non optimal lightning fast conditions.
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or this is an HN out of touch moment.
The obvious difference (and thus massive advantage) of the cloudfare product is that it is accessible over the normal internet without needing to install a tor client.
I'm sure that works for some subset of the population where all potential users are already comfortable using Tor; but imagine trying to share your PoC website with the designer/client and you are asking them to install Tor browser.
This has existed for a long time and has been abused by quite a few people. I've seen some cc nodes using a random known cloudflare site and spoofing hostname to a temporary cloudflare site. IMO this should require a login at bare minimum.
I find it quite shocking that orgs with some great designers like cloudflare are doing this. Broken layouts, trios of random uppercase words sprinkled around. It's crazy. How does it inspire confidence in a product, knowing that the landing page was created in 10 seconds?
I like Cloudflare Tunnels a lot, but something that annoys me is that officially you're not allowed to use them for streaming video, meaning I can't put it in front of my Jellyfin without breaking TOS.
I think that rule is more of a "we reserve the right to..." rule, but it makes me sad because I'd rather not open up ports on my router to expose my Jellyfin to my parents.
I discovered and set this up the other day, added jellyfin, immich and forgejo and was really happy about the result for five minutes, before I discovered that limitation in the TOS. Now I only use it for forgejo. Have you found a different solution to exposing jellyfin?
Use pangolin (you can self host), been using it for a while and it’s great, under the hood it’s a vpn+reverse proxy which you can do yourself too.
In pangolin you can have public or private resources, where private ones you need to authenticate through pangolin first (either pass or others like pin number for your parents so easy to remember). When you link your domain for public ones, I suggest you make a sub domain for it, so your apps will be a sub to your subdomain, that way you keep control of your main domain while having automatic assignment for your apps rather than manually, and if you didn’t issue a certificate, that sub.subdomain is basically invisible on the internet unless you host a service to expose it.
Bandwidth costs money and streaming video costs several orders of magnitude more than just your random web/dev apps. Asking CF to foot the bill for entertainment streaming is really quite a lot.
Are we in an age where no one even bothers to open the product pages they generate? The first subtitle with the font color almost matching the background. Or it's even worse that a human looked at it and said "yep, that's OK"?
frp is nice. I have the tiniest Amazon Lightsail instance running a tunnel to a Minecraft server in my basement. It’s cheaper than getting a fixed IP from my ISP, at sufficiently low traffic.
Cool but the obvious flaw with this is that CF leaks DNS-records. So bots will find these urls instantly. Not sure why they have not fixed that or if it is even possible to fix.
how long until someone's agent sets up a tunnel for the world to see one's most sensitive, private and embarrassing information or insecure work-in-progress app? granted, for the brew install some massive permissions are needed, so hopefully for those running their agent's in a sandbox, you should be safe.. should be..
It will be nice if it had persistent URLs and and SDK for desktop applications. It could solve a lot of small issues for a project I am currently busy with.
My wife and I have a mobile group/shared bot system where we can make mini apps and collab.
Anything from baby stuff, groceries, shopping, planning, wine tracker app, simple/fun/useful data things, etc…
We have Tailscale on our phones and can instantly and privately see without deployment or anything crazy via our secure VPN.
Think shared Claude Artifacts that don’t live @ Anthropic.
Tried to first do this with Cloudflare Tunnels (because I love Cloudflare), but between the broken dashboard side of Zero Trust and nightmare of Warp… it was basically impossible to setup. I guess that’s all super enterprise, which seems to be very anti-Cloudflare philosophically to not be able to self do things.
Will check out Quick Tunnels but I think it’s missing the bigger integration offerings Tailscale has/does still.
Only reason I have it (cloud flare tunnels) setup for personal use is because I had to do it for work years ago and yeah, Enterprise(tm) is a good description, haven't touched it in years so when it breaks I'll likely use something else.
Getting it to do what I wanted with a traefik front router with cloudflared talking to arbitrary subdomain that is spun up and broadcast from the other project side was very painful in a "this could be more friendly" way.
It has been truly bulletproof though since then so that's almost enough to make me go reread all the docs.
Us too, consider using your bots to migrate your tailnet to headscale. Daily driving Headscale + Headplane + Tailscale’s graciously provided/compatible native apps makes me feel like my devices are truly under my control.
Tailscale is truly a cheat code. I have a web app that I run locally to control terminals on my Mac. I access the website on my phone using the 100.xx IP address and can code on the go. No need for a Mac or iOS app.
You can also use Tailscale serve to get a HTTPS url like Cloudflared but it's only visible to your tailnet. Be careful using Cloudflare tunnels because they are public and bots start poking around immediately.
This is not anything new they have been around since the tunnels project launched. What is more concerning is the AI slop webpage and just the "AI" centered relaunch of an existing product.
What's surprised me, just earlier today I let Codex write a minor PR for simple open-source webapp. I needed HTTPS for testing secured context Web API. (Web Bluetooth)
While testing it locally Codex by itself suggests using CF Tunnels but what's more interesting it actually used the Quick Tunnels.
Coming from days where I get warnings of vibe-coded generated code using deprecated code or older APIs, I must say using something so fresh is quite impressive.
The page is a fine exemplar of marketing deception. Banner says:
Free, secure tunnel for everything you are building.
Preview and ship ideas globally in seconds with Quick Tunnels. Deploy your local application to the Internet with a single command.
Clicking through Explore Cloudflare Tunnel leads us to:
Looking to expose public applications?
This documentation covers Cloudflare Tunnel use cases for private networking and Zero Trust, like VPN replacement and private network access. For publishing public web applications, APIs, and services to the Internet through Cloudflare refer to ...
Oh I use this for testing and demos between my phone and computer. Ngrok is fine, probably better off using Tailscale, but it's very easy to just run a quick tunnel with "cloudflared tunnel --url localhost:XXXX".
Cloudflare's only goal here is to put themselves between everyone and charge a toll. They are running a protection racket where they themselves are causing much of the damage they offer protection from. This is another example.
It's a nice ability, but I dont like the terms of use.
Anything specific to watch out for?
On what url were those? Or Cloudflare's TOS in general ?
I just spent a week writing a harness around the existing tunnels to make this by hand.
Historically, we’ve found that their tunnels have really high latency variance. For example something that’s normally 30-50ms to ec2 is now 115ms-750ms
No-ip gives out free dynamic DNS with a static URL. I use it for Sunshine desktop streaming when I travel.
Yeah, but then you are always exposing your public IP.
Exposing it to what exactly? The internet? Yes that's how it works
This requires no port forwarding, so someone brute force scanning your IP won't find this and your open port. they also might have a harder time figuring out what service has been exposed since the port number itself will be unknown.
Claude worked overtime on this webpage
Is this their version of https://tailscale.com/tailcat ? I can't tell if you need to auth
edit: yeah, it says no account creation, neat!
feels more like an ngrok competitor
This is a crowded space with lots of solutions (oss and commercial)
https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
More like their version of Tailscale funnel I think
I believe with tailscale you don’t have to trust a 3rd party with your cleartext traffic
This is handy, but I wonder how much it will cannibalize their services. I have a simple app deployed on cloudflare for a very niche single purpose use, but I wouldn't have bothered if I had this. Serving it from my own machine would have been fine.
Cloudflare Tunnels has been a free service of Cloudflare for quite a while now. What's new is being able to use them without needing an account.
It's not new. Maybe this page is new, but being able to set up a quick tunnel on trycloudflare.com without an account has been a thing for years.
Not many people run their local machine 24/7.
What does reality look like on this nowadays?
My initial thought was desktops generally run 24/7, with laptops running when in use. At least for the customer at the market intersection for this type of product.
I often tell my dev colleagues to avoid having their PC turned on all the time, be it because of the electricity bill cost, environmental impact or simply to make the longevity of the hardware a little longer. Granted almost everyone just ignores those things even if they're conscious of it, so I'd say you're right
Very few people own desktops anymore. Generally people only buy desktops if they need to run a GPU, such as for gaming or running a local model.
There are people who turn off their computer?
Maybe it's a nice way to quickly test a new service or change over the internet without going through the git process, same way one would use ngrok - I could see that being helpful when prototyping / pocs, etc - before deploying changes to your app via the proper channel, especially if you are already using cloudflare for your domains/apps. As other people said, it probably would not be practical or scalable for most people to run an app 24/7 from their laptop using their home or office internet connection.
Tunneling was something that recently fell out of the work I've been doing [1]. I've used Cloudflare Tunnels before but I just have low trust with them recently with how big they are getting. All of these nice things come at the cost of pushing _a lot_ of traffic through their systems.
[1]: https://dntls.substack.com/p/the-new-internet
This is pretty great and I think this will be quite important in the age where everyone has their self-hosted services.
If there's any company in the world that can survive a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their systems it's Cloudflare.
I bet these new tunnels end up being a fraction of a percentage point of their network traffic.
Yeah, I don't doubt their infrastructure at all. In fact, I rate them fairly high in terms of reliability and performance. I've honestly been a fan of them for a very long time - it's just I'm watching all of this centralization happen and it sets my Spidey sense off. Like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Gotcha, that totally makes sense.
Don’t the free tunnels have explicit limits on bandwidth and streaming?
It’s a concentration of power issue.
I didn't take it as a capacity concern, but a "how much data do they get to look at" one.
They see all the traffic in cleartext. Plus you have to trust them not to maliciously alter your traffic. As a US company, their options may be limited if they are coerced by their government to do so.
Just use TLS / mTLS over the tunnel, no?
Reality check - you are not pushing “_a lot_” of traffic relative to any hyperscaler or large scale CDN. They push hundreds of Tbps sustained. You don’t peak at a few Mbps.
They can monitor extreme outliers. It’s not an issue for them.
I think they're talking about market capture risks
In hindsight, that was probably a confusing sentence. I was more pointing out how much traffic flows trough their systems which ends up making it an attractive honeypot, especially as a U.S. company.
Cloudflare want you to push traffic through their systems. This is yet another traffic generator to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product viz. the enterprise DDoS protection.
Interesting how 4/4 other replies didn't get the centralisation concern despite it being a fairly often discussed topic
Yeah, it reminds me of Google. Fool me twice ...
I'm not trusting any of these corporates any more
Don't all these free proxy services always fall prey to blacklists because scammers,etc abuse them until they're useless?
Yes they actually do, but because its cloudflare which is offering this, blacklisting it might lead to blacklisting can be more negative and cloudflare has a much higher incentive to not make these tunnels useless. They are also more powerful and can fix things which would be harder for smaller companies to handle (atleast within the context of cloudflare tunnels)
Wow, exfiltrating data has never been easier!
Can confirm. Coming from ngrok, the main reason we had to make tunneling not anonymized etc was because of scammers, etc on the internet. Other players in the space bypass this by open sourcing the tech, or separating the architecture entirely. This is cool and all, but ultimately gives nefarious actors on the internet more opportunities.
Probably why they used the trycloudflare.com domain as they expect it to be blocked.
Does this have a more generous allowance than ngrok? From what I can read no limits are mentioned
I don't know if there's an overall limit, but their regular tunnels have a limit of 100 MB per request which breaks stuff like Immich.
These are the limitations mentioned on the docs [1]. Quick Tunnels are subject to a hard limit on the number of concurrent requests that can be proxied at any point in time. Currently, this limit is 200 in-flight requests. If a Quick Tunnel hits this limit, the HTTP response will return a 429 status code. Quick Tunnels do not support Server-Sent Events (SSE).
[1]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...
My AI discovered this days ago when I wanted to deploy a new vibe coded website (it was to keep score while playing whist and rentz)
Thought it was very cool
If your a hobbiest or dev just testing your services, it makes more sense to utilize onion services imho.
It does the exact same thing, except supported by a global network of volunteers around the world.
Sure, you get some latency, but this is actually ideal for testing. You should know how your service operates in non optimal lightning fast conditions.
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or this is an HN out of touch moment.
The obvious difference (and thus massive advantage) of the cloudfare product is that it is accessible over the normal internet without needing to install a tor client.
I'm sure that works for some subset of the population where all potential users are already comfortable using Tor; but imagine trying to share your PoC website with the designer/client and you are asking them to install Tor browser.
Is different than sharing your work with a client.
I personally wouldnt make it SOP to utilize a complely free service like this to share my work. I'm not saying it's not convient, it definitely is.
But you shouldn't subject a clients product to terms they probably aren't aware of.
This has existed for a long time and has been abused by quite a few people. I've seen some cc nodes using a random known cloudflare site and spoofing hostname to a temporary cloudflare site. IMO this should require a login at bare minimum.
if you think people won't abuse it because you're making them log in with a free email address...
This requires zero effort and you can deploy hundreds to thousands while maintaining 1000 gmail, proton etc takes resources and money.
They already do this. the email accounts already exist
what a sloppy website, did cloudflare fired bunch of ui/ux designer? Every text is slop lol.
yep, and all those fired and remaining are busy ai-native proofing their careers and tokenmaxxing everything including copy
I swear if I see one more "pill-badge callout -> header -> subtitle" with gradient background and hover-cards landing page I'm going to crash out
Kinda like this one? https://serverbox.stupidlabs.lol/ ( ⸝⸝´ ᵕ `⸝⸝)
Looks like they straight up vibe coded the landing page lol.
I find it quite shocking that orgs with some great designers like cloudflare are doing this. Broken layouts, trios of random uppercase words sprinkled around. It's crazy. How does it inspire confidence in a product, knowing that the landing page was created in 10 seconds?
I like Cloudflare Tunnels a lot, but something that annoys me is that officially you're not allowed to use them for streaming video, meaning I can't put it in front of my Jellyfin without breaking TOS.
I think that rule is more of a "we reserve the right to..." rule, but it makes me sad because I'd rather not open up ports on my router to expose my Jellyfin to my parents.
I discovered and set this up the other day, added jellyfin, immich and forgejo and was really happy about the result for five minutes, before I discovered that limitation in the TOS. Now I only use it for forgejo. Have you found a different solution to exposing jellyfin?
I have a proxy set up with the Oracle Always Free VMs they provide. It works well enough.
For free idk, I personally use a VPS (with unlimited traffic) and Tailscale. Someone has to pay for the public IP and proxy.
i just use wireguard or tailscale, provision a subdomain with a custom ssl and resolve to a nat ip.
Use pangolin (you can self host), been using it for a while and it’s great, under the hood it’s a vpn+reverse proxy which you can do yourself too. In pangolin you can have public or private resources, where private ones you need to authenticate through pangolin first (either pass or others like pin number for your parents so easy to remember). When you link your domain for public ones, I suggest you make a sub domain for it, so your apps will be a sub to your subdomain, that way you keep control of your main domain while having automatic assignment for your apps rather than manually, and if you didn’t issue a certificate, that sub.subdomain is basically invisible on the internet unless you host a service to expose it.
Bandwidth costs money and streaming video costs several orders of magnitude more than just your random web/dev apps. Asking CF to foot the bill for entertainment streaming is really quite a lot.
I know. I'm not "upset" over it, just that it makes the service less useful for me.
Are we in an age where no one even bothers to open the product pages they generate? The first subtitle with the font color almost matching the background. Or it's even worse that a human looked at it and said "yep, that's OK"?
Are we in an age where no one even bothers to open the product pages they generate?
We live in an age of monkey-see-monkey-do management.
When Microsoft axed its QA team, it gave permission for everyone else to make the same stupid mistake.
It's fine on light mode. It's just the dark mode that's terrible. Seems likely they only tested the former.
I see, good point. Some might be confused about my comment then.
[ad]
For someone looking for an opensource solutions, following is an awesome resource for tunnelling
https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
I have played around with frp, bore and ngrok.
frp is nice. I have the tiniest Amazon Lightsail instance running a tunnel to a Minecraft server in my basement. It’s cheaper than getting a fixed IP from my ISP, at sufficiently low traffic.
The website looks broken in dark mode on Firefox.
Quick Tunnels look great for demos and temporary dev environments. I’d still be hesitant to make them part of a long-lived production setup.
You should be more than hesitant - don’t do it. They literally market them for quick demos. And not long lived production.
I use for the exact same thing. Running "cloudflared tunnel" sets up a temp solution. No log in needed, pretty convenient.
What's the difference between this and their previous Cloudflare Tunnels solution?
From their docs [0]:
[0: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...
It looks like tunnels can do some non https stuff these days? But it's a bit unclear
Cool but the obvious flaw with this is that CF leaks DNS-records. So bots will find these urls instantly. Not sure why they have not fixed that or if it is even possible to fix.
Love this, very cool.
I used to use a service called ngrok for this, but it's nice that Cloudflare is offering one now.
how long until someone's agent sets up a tunnel for the world to see one's most sensitive, private and embarrassing information or insecure work-in-progress app? granted, for the brew install some massive permissions are needed, so hopefully for those running their agent's in a sandbox, you should be safe.. should be..
So... Cloudflare built Ngrok?
It will be nice if it had persistent URLs and and SDK for desktop applications. It could solve a lot of small issues for a project I am currently busy with.
That's handled by all the prior releases of cloudflare tunnels
My wife and I have a mobile group/shared bot system where we can make mini apps and collab.
Anything from baby stuff, groceries, shopping, planning, wine tracker app, simple/fun/useful data things, etc…
We have Tailscale on our phones and can instantly and privately see without deployment or anything crazy via our secure VPN.
Think shared Claude Artifacts that don’t live @ Anthropic.
Tried to first do this with Cloudflare Tunnels (because I love Cloudflare), but between the broken dashboard side of Zero Trust and nightmare of Warp… it was basically impossible to setup. I guess that’s all super enterprise, which seems to be very anti-Cloudflare philosophically to not be able to self do things.
Will check out Quick Tunnels but I think it’s missing the bigger integration offerings Tailscale has/does still.
Only reason I have it (cloud flare tunnels) setup for personal use is because I had to do it for work years ago and yeah, Enterprise(tm) is a good description, haven't touched it in years so when it breaks I'll likely use something else.
Getting it to do what I wanted with a traefik front router with cloudflared talking to arbitrary subdomain that is spun up and broadcast from the other project side was very painful in a "this could be more friendly" way.
It has been truly bulletproof though since then so that's almost enough to make me go reread all the docs.
Us too, consider using your bots to migrate your tailnet to headscale. Daily driving Headscale + Headplane + Tailscale’s graciously provided/compatible native apps makes me feel like my devices are truly under my control.
So you have a phone to phone VPN and each runs services or just a regular rapid/synology at home with containers?
Can you elaborate on this? Sounds really cool!
Interested in the the bot system and how your self publishing app artifacts that you've got running. Care to share more?
Tailscale is truly a cheat code. I have a web app that I run locally to control terminals on my Mac. I access the website on my phone using the 100.xx IP address and can code on the go. No need for a Mac or iOS app.
You can also use Tailscale serve to get a HTTPS url like Cloudflared but it's only visible to your tailnet. Be careful using Cloudflare tunnels because they are public and bots start poking around immediately.
Now that is one vibe-coded website
I quite like pinggy for this. You don't need to install anything, since it uses a plain SSH tunnel.
ssh -p 443 -R0:localhost:9051 free.pinggy.io
(Free for 1h each session)
The number of vibe coded apps accidentally hosted on dev laptops is about to explode.
This is not anything new they have been around since the tunnels project launched. What is more concerning is the AI slop webpage and just the "AI" centered relaunch of an existing product.
So is this basically a ngrok from CF?
Cloudflare doesn't really seem to care about their tunnel product. "cloudflared service install broken on macOS" broken since 2021: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared/issues/327
What's surprised me, just earlier today I let Codex write a minor PR for simple open-source webapp. I needed HTTPS for testing secured context Web API. (Web Bluetooth)
While testing it locally Codex by itself suggests using CF Tunnels but what's more interesting it actually used the Quick Tunnels.
Coming from days where I get warnings of vibe-coded generated code using deprecated code or older APIs, I must say using something so fresh is quite impressive.
The page is a fine exemplar of marketing deception. Banner says:
Clicking through Explore Cloudflare Tunnel leads us to:
Oh I use this for testing and demos between my phone and computer. Ngrok is fine, probably better off using Tailscale, but it's very easy to just run a quick tunnel with "cloudflared tunnel --url localhost:XXXX".
Off-topic: That web page looks exactly like my vibe-coded utilities.
Just tried.. not working.
Cloudflare's only goal here is to put themselves between everyone and charge a toll. They are running a protection racket where they themselves are causing much of the damage they offer protection from. This is another example.
So this is basically ngrok?
So it is ngrok 10 years later?