Cloudflare Quick Tunnels

191

jjcbhmr about 3 hours ago 97 commentsRead Article on try.cloudflare.com

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

69% Positive

Analyzed from 2238 words in the discussion.

Discussion (97 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

TIPSIO•13 minutes 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.

cbsks•2 minutes 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!

noir_lord•10 minutes 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.

nemosaltat•6 minutes 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.

_blk•4 minutes ago

So you have a phone to phone VPN and each runs services or just a regular rapid/synology at home with containers?

smetannik•3 minutes ago

So is this basically a ngrok from CF?

kincl•about 2 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!

hermanradtke•about 2 hours ago

feels more like an ngrok competitor

israrkhan•about 1 hour ago

This is a crowded space with lots of solutions (oss and commercial)

https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

Tepix•about 1 hour ago

I believe with tailscale you don’t have to trust a 3rd party with your cleartext traffic

alasano•about 1 hour ago

More like their version of Tailscale funnel I think

aliasxneo•about 2 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

pstoll•about 1 hour 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.

aliasxneo•38 minutes 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.

ijustlovemath•40 minutes ago

I think they're talking about market capture risks

simonw•about 1 hour 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.

aliasxneo•about 1 hour 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.

simonw•18 minutes ago

Gotcha, that totally makes sense.

ceejayoz•about 1 hour ago

I didn't take it as a capacity concern, but a "how much data do they get to look at" one.

bix6•about 1 hour ago

It’s a concentration of power issue.

Tepix•about 1 hour 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.

insanitybit•about 1 hour ago

Just use TLS / mTLS over the tunnel, no?

eli•about 1 hour ago

Don’t the free tunnels have explicit limits on bandwidth and streaming?

Perz1val•14 minutes ago

Interesting how 4/4 other replies didn't get the centralisation concern despite it being a fairly often discussed topic

t_mahmood•10 minutes ago

Yeah, it reminds me of Google. Fool me twice ...

I'm not trusting any of these corporates any more

inopinatus•about 1 hour 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.

afzalive•about 1 hour ago

This is pretty great and I think this will be quite important in the age where everyone has their self-hosted services.

israrkhan•about 1 hour 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.

drdexebtjl•27 minutes 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.

rplnt•about 1 hour 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"?

lkbm•about 1 hour ago

It's fine on light mode. It's just the dark mode that's terrible. Seems likely they only tested the former.

rplnt•about 1 hour ago

I see, good point. Some might be confused about my comment then.

reaperducer•about 1 hour 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.

dangoodmanUT•about 2 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

afisxisto•9 minutes 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)

_pdp_•19 minutes 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.

yodon•8 minutes ago

That's handled by all the prior releases of cloudflare tunnels

scosman•8 minutes ago

The number of vibe coded apps accidentally hosted on dev laptops is about to explode.

whizzter•about 2 hours ago

Don't all these free proxy services always fall prey to blacklists because scammers,etc abuse them until they're useless?

axus•about 1 hour ago

Wow, exfiltrating data has never been easier!

Imustaskforhelp•about 2 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)

usewik•21 minutes 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..

himata4113•about 1 hour 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.

booi•38 minutes ago

if you think people won't abuse it because you're making them log in with a free email address...

himata4113•37 minutes ago

This requires zero effort and you can deploy hundreds to thousands while maintaining 1000 gmail, proton etc takes resources and money.

booi•19 minutes ago

They already do this. the email accounts already exist

Narciss•about 1 hour 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

ggg011012•about 1 hour 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.

pstoll•42 minutes ago

You should be more than hesitant - don’t do it. They literally market them for quick demos. And not long lived production.

nullbyte•25 minutes 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.

corvad•8 minutes 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.

JV00•about 2 hours ago

Does this have a more generous allowance than ngrok? From what I can read no limits are mentioned

raahelb•39 minutes 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...

daemonologist•about 2 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.

kelvinjps10•about 1 hour ago

What's the difference between this and their previous Cloudflare Tunnels solution?

raahelb•34 minutes ago

From their docs [0]:

> Free tunnels are meant to be used for testing and development, not for deploying a production website.

[0: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/co...

smalltorch•about 1 hour 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.

thenewnewguy•about 1 hour 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.

smalltorch•about 1 hour 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.

frankcostanza•20 minutes ago

So... Cloudflare built Ngrok?

singpolyma3•about 1 hour ago

It looks like tunnels can do some non https stuff these days? But it's a bit unclear

ZeroCool2u•about 2 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.

aniviacat•about 2 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.

bakugo•about 1 hour 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.

danserfaty•about 1 hour 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.

roncesvalles•about 1 hour ago

Not many people run their local machine 24/7.

berofeev•about 1 hour 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.

roncesvalles•25 minutes 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.

JavierFlores09•about 1 hour 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

sophacles•about 1 hour ago

There are people who turn off their computer?

tombert•about 1 hour 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.

bityard•about 1 hour 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.

tombert•44 minutes ago

I know. I'm not "upset" over it, just that it makes the service less useful for me.

TonyStr•about 1 hour 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?

tombert•about 1 hour ago

I have a proxy set up with the Oracle Always Free VMs they provide. It works well enough.

madeforhnyo•about 1 hour ago

For free idk, I personally use a VPS (with unlimited traffic) and Tailscale. Someone has to pay for the public IP and proxy.

guluarte•9 minutes ago

i just use wireguard or tailscale, provision a subdomain with a custom ssl and resolve to a nat ip.

tamimio•about 1 hour 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.

smalltorch•about 2 hours ago

It's a nice ability, but I dont like the terms of use.

ZeroCool2u•about 2 hours ago

Anything specific to watch out for?

whizzter•about 2 hours ago

On what url were those? Or Cloudflare's TOS in general ?

damsta•about 1 hour ago

The website looks broken in dark mode on Firefox.

dbmikus•9 minutes ago

Now that is one vibe-coded website

AtNightWeCode•33 minutes 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.

user3939382•about 2 hours ago

I just spent a week writing a harness around the existing tunnels to make this by hand.

xeornet•about 1 hour ago

Looks like they straight up vibe coded the landing page lol.

rozab•about 1 hour 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?

075326899532•about 1 hour ago

[ad]

ThrowawayTestr•about 2 hours ago

No-ip gives out free dynamic DNS with a static URL. I use it for Sunshine desktop streaming when I travel.

cuu508•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, but then you are always exposing your public IP.

monster_truck•about 1 hour ago

Exposing it to what exactly? The internet? Yes that's how it works

johng•about 1 hour 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_boi•about 1 hour ago

what a sloppy website, did cloudflare fired bunch of ui/ux designer? Every text is slop lol.

cub-creature•12 minutes 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

usewik•19 minutes ago

yep, and all those fired and remaining are busy ai-native proofing their careers and tokenmaxxing everything including copy

altmanaltman•about 2 hours ago

Claude worked overtime on this webpage