Cloudflare Quick Tunnels(try.cloudflare.com)
258 pointsby jcbhmr4 hours ago49 comments
  • adamfeldmanan hour ago
    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
    • keeganpoppen21 minutes ago
      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.
  • TIPSIOan hour ago
    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.

    • theturtletalksan hour ago
      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.

    • cbsksan hour ago
      > 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…

      Can you elaborate on this? Sounds really cool!

      • SwamyM24 minutes ago
        Seconded.
        • 9 minutes ago
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    • noir_lordan hour ago
      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.

    • nemosaltatan hour ago
      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.
    • FridayCuriousitan hour ago
      Interested in the the bot system and how your self publishing app artifacts that you've got running. Care to share more?
    • _blkan hour ago
      So you have a phone to phone VPN and each runs services or just a regular rapid/synology at home with containers?
  • mgw11 minutes ago
    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?
  • kincl3 hours ago
    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!

    • Tepix2 hours ago
      I believe with tailscale you don’t have to trust a 3rd party with your cleartext traffic
      • athrowaway3z20 minutes ago
        But you do seem to get to host a https version of your app in case you need features locked behind secure context.
      • spwa412 minutes ago
        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)

    • hermanradtke3 hours ago
      feels more like an ngrok competitor
    • alasano2 hours ago
      More like their version of Tailscale funnel I think
  • aliasxneo3 hours ago
    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

    • pstoll2 hours ago
      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.

      • aliasxneo2 hours ago
        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.
      • ijustlovemath2 hours ago
        I think they're talking about market capture risks
    • simonw2 hours ago
      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.

      • aliasxneo2 hours ago
        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.
        • swozey26 minutes ago
          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.

        • simonwan hour ago
          Gotcha, that totally makes sense.
      • ceejayoz2 hours ago
        I didn't take it as a capacity concern, but a "how much data do they get to look at" one.
      • bix62 hours ago
        It’s a concentration of power issue.
      • eli2 hours ago
        Don’t the free tunnels have explicit limits on bandwidth and streaming?
      • Tepix2 hours ago
        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.
        • insanitybit2 hours ago
          Just use TLS / mTLS over the tunnel, no?
    • Perz1valan hour ago
      Interesting how 4/4 other replies didn't get the centralisation concern despite it being a fairly often discussed topic
    • t_mahmoodan hour ago
      Yeah, it reminds me of Google. Fool me twice ...

      I'm not trusting any of these corporates any more

    • inopinatus2 hours ago
      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.
    • afzalive2 hours ago
      This is pretty great and I think this will be quite important in the age where everyone has their self-hosted services.
  • rplnt2 hours ago
    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"?
    • lkbm2 hours ago
      It's fine on light mode. It's just the dark mode that's terrible. Seems likely they only tested the former.
      • rplnt2 hours ago
        I see, good point. Some might be confused about my comment then.
    • reaperducer2 hours ago
      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.

  • israrkhan2 hours ago
    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.

    • drdexebtjlan hour ago
      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.
  • dangoodmanUT3 hours ago
    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
  • rock_artistan hour ago
    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.

  • whizzter3 hours ago
    Don't all these free proxy services always fall prey to blacklists because scammers,etc abuse them until they're useless?
    • uxjw40 minutes ago
      Probably why they used the trycloudflare.com domain as they expect it to be blocked.
    • axus2 hours ago
      Wow, exfiltrating data has never been easier!
    • srichard1643 minutes ago
      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.
    • Imustaskforhelp3 hours ago
      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)
  • everybodyknowsan hour ago
    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 ...

  • skhameneh38 minutes ago
    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.
    • vlyan26 minutes ago
      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)

    • PufPufPuf28 minutes ago
      Group of three cards, each with a left-aligned icon, heading and subheading stacked -- that's the m-dash of web design.
  • himata41132 hours ago
    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.
    • booi2 hours ago
      if you think people won't abuse it because you're making them log in with a free email address...
      • himata41132 hours ago
        This requires zero effort and you can deploy hundreds to thousands while maintaining 1000 gmail, proton etc takes resources and money.
        • booian hour ago
          They already do this. the email accounts already exist
  • infogulch35 minutes ago
    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.

  • _pdp_an hour ago
    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.
    • yodonan hour ago
      That's handled by all the prior releases of cloudflare tunnels
    • srichard1639 minutes ago
      ngrok does this free, but with an account
  • rinconrexan hour ago
    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".
  • Narciss2 hours ago
    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

  • usewikan hour ago
    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..
  • JV003 hours ago
    Does this have a more generous allowance than ngrok? From what I can read no limits are mentioned
    • raahelb2 hours ago
      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...

    • daemonologist3 hours ago
      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.
  • ggg0110122 hours ago
    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.
    • rinconrexan hour ago
      I use for the exact same thing. Running "cloudflared tunnel" sets up a temp solution. No log in needed, pretty convenient.
    • pstoll2 hours ago
      You should be more than hesitant - don’t do it. They literally market them for quick demos. And not long lived production.
  • afisxistoan hour ago
    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)

  • spprashantan hour ago
    Off-topic: That web page looks exactly like my vibe-coded utilities.
  • kelvinjps102 hours ago
    What's the difference between this and their previous Cloudflare Tunnels solution?
  • smetannikan hour ago
    So is this basically a ngrok from CF?
  • smalltorch2 hours ago
    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.

    • thenewnewguy2 hours ago
      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.

      • smalltorch2 hours ago
        >hobbiest or dev just testing your services

        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.

  • scosmanan hour ago
    The number of vibe coded apps accidentally hosted on dev laptops is about to explode.
  • nullbytean hour ago
    Love this, very cool.

    I used to use a service called ngrok for this, but it's nice that Cloudflare is offering one now.

  • ZeroCool2u3 hours ago
    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.
    • aniviacat3 hours ago
      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.
      • bakugo2 hours ago
        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.
    • danserfaty2 hours ago
      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.
    • roncesvalles2 hours ago
      Not many people run their local machine 24/7.
      • berofeev2 hours ago
        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.

        • SoftTalker25 minutes ago
          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.
        • JavierFlores092 hours ago
          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
        • roncesvallesan hour ago
          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.
      • sophacles2 hours ago
        There are people who turn off their computer?
  • bitlad43 minutes ago
    So it is ngrok 10 years later?
  • rkovashikawa14 minutes ago
    cloudflare rocks
  • maipen21 minutes ago
    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.

  • bilater43 minutes ago
    So this is basically ngrok?
  • superkuh43 minutes ago
    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.
  • singpolyma32 hours ago
    It looks like tunnels can do some non https stuff these days? But it's a bit unclear
  • freakynit44 minutes ago
    Just tried.. not working.
  • smalltorch3 hours ago
    It's a nice ability, but I dont like the terms of use.
    • ZeroCool2u3 hours ago
      Anything specific to watch out for?
    • whizzter3 hours ago
      On what url were those? Or Cloudflare's TOS in general ?
  • general_reveal33 minutes ago
    Could we turn this into p2p cloud hosting for all?
  • tombert2 hours ago
    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.

    • TonyStr2 hours ago
      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?
      • tombert2 hours ago
        I have a proxy set up with the Oracle Always Free VMs they provide. It works well enough.
      • madeforhnyo2 hours ago
        For free idk, I personally use a VPS (with unlimited traffic) and Tailscale. Someone has to pay for the public IP and proxy.
      • guluartean hour ago
        i just use wireguard or tailscale, provision a subdomain with a custom ssl and resolve to a nat ip.
    • bityard2 hours ago
      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.
      • tombert2 hours ago
        I know. I'm not "upset" over it, just that it makes the service less useful for me.
    • tamimio2 hours ago
      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.
  • frankcostanzaan hour ago
    So... Cloudflare built Ngrok?
  • damsta2 hours ago
    The website looks broken in dark mode on Firefox.
  • corvadan hour ago
    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.
  • user39393823 hours ago
    I just spent a week writing a harness around the existing tunnels to make this by hand.
  • AtNightWeCode2 hours ago
    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.
  • xeornet2 hours ago
    Looks like they straight up vibe coded the landing page lol.
    • rozab2 hours ago
      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?
      • maipen19 minutes ago
        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.
  • dbmikusan hour ago
    Now that is one vibe-coded website
  • 0753268995322 hours ago
    [ad]
  • ThrowawayTestr3 hours ago
    No-ip gives out free dynamic DNS with a static URL. I use it for Sunshine desktop streaming when I travel.
    • cuu5083 hours ago
      Yeah, but then you are always exposing your public IP.
      • monster_truck2 hours ago
        Exposing it to what exactly? The internet? Yes that's how it works
        • cuu50837 minutes ago
          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

        • johng2 hours ago
          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.
  • cute_boi2 hours ago
    what a sloppy website, did cloudflare fired bunch of ui/ux designer? Every text is slop lol.
    • cub-creaturean hour ago
      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
    • usewikan hour ago
      yep, and all those fired and remaining are busy ai-native proofing their careers and tokenmaxxing everything including copy
  • altmanaltman3 hours ago
    Claude worked overtime on this webpage