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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.
If somebody learns that such-and-such DynDNS URL is mine, they can always do a DNS lookup to find my current IP address. They can:
- find my approximate physical location
- regularly scan ports on my IP and wait for me to accidentally expose a service I didn't mean to
- track me in any access logs they have access to
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
But you do seem to get to host a https version of your app in case you need features locked behind secure context.
That can't be right. If they're hosting on a different DNS they have an absolute need to MITM ssl/tls traffic. Can't work otherwise.
So cloudflare sees your plaintext. Btw: tailscale does not (but ssl errors and warnings are unavoidable)
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
There's pros and cons on the longevity side. 24/7 use causes more wear to mechanical parts (fans for instance) but can be better for the electronics, as heat cycles are a big part of the problem there.
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.
Yeah my desktop is on 24/7. Laptop is on when in use. Phone is on all the time too, of course, but I don't use it for browsing or work nearly as much as my desktop.
There are people who turn off their computer?
You do if you're hosting a website on it :-)
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.
The "centralization" which is cloudflare basically running its own walled garden version of the interent (how often do you see a cloudflare page checking if you're human?) is exactly why a lot of people do NOT like cloudflare. And if you've known about CF and its leadership since their inception you'd be even more wary of sticking your stuff over there.
I've migrated many companies off of cloudflare, usually because they end up pissing off companies when a contract renewal comes up and they slam them with massively increased bills and almost useless support if you aren't very high paying enterprise. I don't know how many CF support tickets I've just given up on over the last 15 years, usually related to their admin page, workers or some weird thing their system does that wasn't documented and I just stop getting responses and definitely don't get fixes.
If you ever worked in webhosting the Cloudflare wordpress/etc extensions are everywhere and back when I did work in hosting tons of support tickets were made because of CF. Could be way better now, I don't go near that industry these days.
The casual CF user sticking it in front of a blog they rarely look at and the business forced CF user has a very different experience. I cringe and seriously consider if I'm interviewing for an infra role and they use cloudflare. Usually it's startups that grew into larger businesses.
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
There are other reasons not to trust them as well, especially if you've seen how their sales team operates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
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
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?
AI took all the effort, so I guess nobody sees value in these little pages anymore. Not even those being paid. It's actually scary.
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.
We are in the age of where hype beats reasoning.
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.
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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...
As far as I can tell, the difference is that they made a new website? The cloudflared instant tunnels have been around for years, including json output as far as I know.
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
ngrok does this free, but with an account
I've been running a couple of websites* on a home machine behind a Cloudflare tunnel for 2-3 years now. The only thing I had to pay for was the DNS registration. There are limits on the traffic you can serve on their free plan, but I'm nowhere near reaching those. I don't know what an SDK would add, you just set up a web server using whatever method suits you, then configure the cloudflared to connect to that. I did find that the online dashboard could not support all the options I wanted, so I switched to using the config file method - it would have been easier if I used that method from the start.
One caveat - there is an option to inject Javascript into your pages for traffic measurement which is ON BY DEFAULT, you have to go to "Web Analytics" and turn this off if you don't want it!
* https://cmacleod.me.uk & https://newsgrouper.org
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!
Seconded.
I’m not GP, but run something that’s pretty close to GPs description. It’s been a fun journey to set up.
The core is chat+audio/video call server running locally on my m3 Mac Studio. Centrifugo has handled the chat concerns very well. LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls. There are a few different options for local STT if you want that.
I used RN via expo for the client and have my friends and family on TestFlight as beta testers. Utility over polish.
With messages and call transcripts on my own box, I can prompt Claude code or Codex to operate on any message or transcript content. And follow up in chat with a message. I do most of that from Claude or ChatGPT mobile apps via remote control to my sessions running in the box.
From there, if I give enough of a specc, anything that happens in chat or call transcripts can become an additional custom workspace in the main app. I think GP calls these mini apps. But they’re essentially rich clients under the main app umbrella. There’s other details, but yeah it’s a strange new world. Check my profile and reach out directly if you want.
Not OP- I think there’s been some cool solutions popping up around hosting personal apps. On the front page this week was Capsule (https://withcapsule.app/). My personal solution is Exhibit (https://github.com/momja/Exhibit) which also has the goal of being a self-hostable artifact store.
I’ve been building something similar with [Homestead](https://myhomestead.dev). It’s my OSS solution for building mini apps. Each mini app is a Resct frontend and the backend (storage, auth, MCP, API, etc) just comes for free.
Interested in the the bot system and how your self publishing app artifacts that you've got running. Care to share more?
I run something similar, and in my system an app artifact is typically just a rich react component in a React Native client. They usually start as prototypes in chat, similar to what the labs provide in their native apps. If I or someone else in my user group wants more depth than a chat widget, then the artifacts can grow into a “workspace”. Oddly enough my richest workspaces have most been for entertainment. DnD, MtG deck building, HN comment thread parsing. And system management. Intrusion detection, feature life cycle/LLM handoff management, call telemetry. I do have a workspace for public county permit lookup which has been handy too. Reach out and I can 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.
For public access, similar to these cloudflare tunnels, there's Tailscale Funnel.
https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel
Tailscale funnel works well but you can only have 1 per Tailscale instance (1 per machine) at the https endpoint so if you want to have a few apps, the others will go on non-https, custom-port URLs.
That's why I keep using tsnet directly, where you can have as many virtual machines, doing sharing or funneling, as you want to.
The CLI doesn't let you do as much as the go library does.
Alternatively, Netbird has been a dream to use over the last half year or so. I think their server software has had some hiccups on new releases, but I stagger those updates anyways. All self hosted, similar concept to Tailscale, very good management UI baked into the self hosted product.
Netbird's great. I've been using Pangolin (https://pangolin.net/) lately for my homelab. It's very similar in functionality to Netbird, but I like the UX of it better.
just use wireguard; tailscale is just the SSO enterprise overlay with a pricing tab.
I pay Tailscale nothing, why switch?
Does this work with remote agents though? I want my claude.ai agents running on my phone to be able to hit my local MCPs on my Mac Mini - my understanding is that tailscale wouldn't work because the execution is being called remotely. But seems like these tunnels would support that.
Until I had tailscale serve generating valid certs, I had a good reason to use Cloudflare tunnels.
But in general I don't want to put everything on the internet side of things.
Mostly, I don't want something open, but more like a "share with" for people who are in the same office (virtually over tailnet, not physically on the same LAN).
This still works great for a demo instead of a product pitch, to send an link out to see something.
I'd still use a real host over a laptop for those.
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)
Thanks for sharing.
- Co-founder of Pinggy.
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" since 2021: https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared/issues/327
yeah am i crazy or could it not like already do this as well? i swear i’ve seen somesuch similar in the cloudflared options. maybe not. but i can second having had some problems over the year getting cloudflared to install/set up correctly. tbf the actual feature works amazing once you get it working.
As I understand it you can make a tunnel, but it's under a domain you control and it's a few clicks in the dashboard to set up, and then a something to run in CLI. That's what my homelab uses. This is just a single CLI command and the whole thing is set up.
Huh I brew installed it and got a working tunnel in like 15 seconds.
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.
As far as I know this has been a provided feature of cloudflare for several years. I don't understand why it was posted today.
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.
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?
There's a number of comments already about how this page looks vibe coded, I'd add that I'm actually shocked at how much this looks like the output of a one-shot prompt. It's not so much that an LLM was used, but a callout on just how generic this page is. How much iteration went into this? At surface it looks like nearly no iteration.
Edit: Well, they just re-vibed it. Went from the most generic Claude 4.6 era to today’s models, quality wise. I wish I had saved a copy of the original, because it would have taken me actual solid effort to make a page that generic out of an LLM.
Group of three cards, each with a left-aligned icon, heading and subheading stacked -- that's the m-dash of web design.
I'll take that over corporate memphis of the previous decade.
(idk if it's really declining or I simply haven't noticed it in a while)
I made my own tunnel system with a $5/mo vps that runs kernel wireguard and accepts my nas' public key. Once connected it DNATs 80/443 traffic down the tunnel to the nas, where its routed to caddy.
The vps runs a custom image that is 2.54 Megabytes. It has a custom kernel with almost everything but networking and wireguard disabled, a fixed-size fs with pre-allocated blocks and inodes to hold the vps wireguard key, and a single pid 1 binary that calls the kernel directly to set up the routing rules, generate a new wireguard key on first boot and save it to the fs, print out the wireguard public key to the console, and loops reap. Updating involves building and uploading a new image, assigning the vps to use it, reboot, wait for the public key in the console then set it on the nas so they can talk.
Very cool, do you use some kind of an atomic distro like nix or something entirely self built using Yocto/Buildroot? I do something similar with a simple SSH tunnel and a NFT rule. Though, I don’t need your kind of ephemeral setup and so I just use Debian.
Could we turn this into p2p cloud hosting for all?
I'm sorry to be offtopic, but this website looks like an hallucination generated by chatgpt 4.
This type of quality downgrade is scary, and it's everywhere now.
cloudflare rocks
Can anyone elaborate on what's new? This exact product has existed from Cloudflare for years. Is it just that they added a new marketing site for it?
"quick" tunnels you can make by installing cloudflare software and running a command, without a cloudflare account, using a fixed "trycloudflare.com" domain and not your own domain.
existing (slow) tunnels you can create once you've set up your own domain for cloudflare to manage its DNS, installing cloudflare software, logging in to your account, and running a similar command.
edit: my bad, quick ones aren't new at all
This has been the behaviour when you launch but don’t connect a specific tunnel for at least a couple of years
Quick tunnels have existed since at least 2022 (when I was using them)
Nothing is new, quick tunnels were launched in 2021
https://blog.cloudflare.com/quick-tunnels-anytime-anywhere/
I want this with TOTP or passkeys. Just giving me a hostname doesn't cut it these days.
Tailscale is one of the most profoundly useful technologies I’ve ever used as small business person. It’s also one I would have never thought to invent despite feeling its lack daily.
This is a very good solution for HTTP(S) tunneling - which is the most frequently needed tunnel. However if you want to play a game, or use SSH, then Pinggy tunnels are very simple to use. One command:
ssh -p 443 -R0:localhost:443 tcp@free.pinggy.io
Disclosure: Co-founder of pinggy.io here.
Edit: I meant TCP tunnels, UDP tunnels, or also TLS tunnels for end-to-end encryption.
i love this! never understood why a proxy app was needed
So you don't know my IP (DDoS target), and because of NAT.
any app will connect with an IP am I missing something . a socket is exactly (IP, port) (src, target) tuple
What kind of usage limits?
A free session runs for 60 seconds after which it has to be restarted and the address changes.
You can get the address with an API call.. but we charge for convenience. Pays the infra bills.
I still remember when ngrok came out. The experience was more or less the same.
It’s interesting that 10 (more?) years later the product has not evolved and, apparently, hasn’t found a way to finance itself without removing the pure free tunneling option.
Worst marketing ever. ngrok had a similar slogan:
something like - "We help you put localhost on the Internet."
What could possibly go wrong?
How many ways can you convey doing the same thing? All the banks out there have almost identical slogans because they do very similar things.
Hm, yeah, depends who you’re marketing this to.
Also, the “0 ports opened” marketing is misleading. It still binds to a port and then also lets people access your resources over it.
I dislike that Cloudflare Engineering has become more… marketingy as of late. Also with their Cloudflare OS misnomer. Their products used to make more sense, what happened?
The main use case: cloud harnesses to access your local network; I highly recommend to run the harness in your local network instead, then you own the session, no tunnel needed.
The other use case for webhooks is ok, but is exactly what ngrok already does since forever with a pretty high free quota.
Seems like the quality of software engineering is now going to zero and just vibe coding unstable alternatives since 2023.
This is cool. I like it! Also Cloudflare design has stepped up so much over the past 2 years.
Does this make working with agents in cloud more interesting? Maybe now I can see my changes right away without waiting for the build and deploy? By running the dev server and tunneling from the sandbox giving me a direct url access somehow?
Can someone chime in here?