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.
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.
Is this primarily for multi-user scenarios or complex setups?
Beyond that, compared to a typical hub-and-spoke WireGuard setup, the main advantage is peer-to-peer connectivity. Clients connect directly to each other when possible, which lowers latency by bypassing a central relay.
AFAIK, they also have different origins:
Pangolin started as an internet-facing reverse proxy (Traefik) combined with a WireGuard server for backend nodes. It has gradually added VPN-like features, including client device access and an internal HTTPS proxy similar to Tailscale Serve.
NetBird is a self-hostable Tailscale alternative that started as a mesh VPN focused on P2P traffic. It recently added its own reverse proxy features (Traefik-based, coincidentally), also similar to Tailscale Serve.
Pangolin is centered on endpoint and ingress management, while NetBird focuses on mesh networking, though their feature sets are increasingly converging.
For public access, similar to these cloudflare tunnels, there's Tailscale Funnel.
Here's `tailscale funnel status` on my machine:
$ tailscale funnel status
# Funnel on:
# - https://my-machine.tailXXXX.ts.net
https://my-machine.tailXXXX.ts.net (Funnel on)
|-- / proxy http://localhost:3000
|-- /foo proxy http://localhost:3001
|-- /bar proxy http://localhost:3002
|-- /baz proxy http://localhost:4004The CLI doesn't let you do as much as the go library does.
The only always-on TS service on my phone is Immich for photo backup, and I don't take enough photos for that to matter much.
My endpoint is a pretty stable (though technically dynamic) IPv4 on one end, but the other might be a cell phone with CGNAT, some random WiFi, blah blah etc. TS does that. If you don't want to use it, cool. Don't. I'm willing to make the tradeoffs to use TS for now. That could change in the future.
> Anything from baby stuff, groceries, shopping, planning, wine tracker app, simple/fun/useful data things, etc…
Can you elaborate on this? Sounds really cool!
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.
For the few services I host that require SSL (eg; WebUSB), I serve the dark service via a standard domain (example.com) so I can still get a LetsEncrypt cert, but public access to that domain resolves to a static page; "Plz connect to OpenZiti & try again". This allows me to have SSL on required dark services without requiring to install a private CA for each client.
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.
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.
Shameless plug, I've built a self-hosted capability here with things like live collaboration for humans and agents. There is a native cloudflare deplyoment and integration with Cloudflare Artifacts. PR for tunnel would be appreciated.
EDIT you don't mean running on your actual phone lol, you mean in the web browser at Claude.ai. Anyway, if you use mcp-proxy for a stdio mcp, or if it's an http mcp alone, then you would need a public endpoint for Claude.ai to connect to. Tailscale will only help you if you use Funnel, but this cloudflare thing is exactly what you need (w/o Tailscale).
https://github.com/dalberto/mcp-ferry
I also use CF managed auth to make auth easier.
Terraform has worked decently well especially since there's a few random settings here and there that aren't exposed anywhere in the UI (facepalm)
Is a new vibe-coded landing page for a 5-year old product really worthy of being on the front page nowadays? There should at least be a [2021] in the title.
Yeah, I just checked the page >can connect their server to the Internet with Argo Tunnel for free
The product is falsely advertised as is:
"Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"
This is on one (or two) particular domain(s) where setting up wildcard DNS should be relatively trivial, if they actually cared enough about the UX of this product to make a special case in their code.
I don't understand how people can launch stuff like this.
I've never seen someone fail a static page like this. And from a huge company like Cloudflare too..
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.
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.
(idk if it's really declining or I simply haven't noticed it in a while)
edit: yeah, it says no account creation, neat!
So cloudflare sees your plaintext. Btw: tailscale does not (but ssl errors and warnings are unavoidable)
https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
I have played around with frp, bore and ngrok.
They can monitor extreme outliers. It’s not an issue for them.
But again my point applies - the chances they get enough people using it that it becomes a meaningfully worse security target than lots of other existing things seems … super low.
It’s a big world, people make many choices I can’t understand (nix? Haskell? Php? <flame wars to /dev/null>). Even if this product nailed it - the number of people who can use it is minuscule - yes even as we add Claude-enabled PMs to the software dev ranks.
Alt view with the old saying - “put all your eggs in one basket … and watch that basket!”
I bet these new tunnels end up being a fraction of a percentage point of their network traffic.
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.
“The substrate itself consists of a few systems…”
I doubt that this is how wordy your communication is.
“It consists of a few systems” would be adequate. And if we had prior context about what else exists that surrounds “the substrate” the “substrate itself” distinction would be meaningful, but it’s not, because you are referring to one object, which is the system you built, and I doubt any enzymes act on it, so it’s likely not a substrate.
I'm not trusting any of these corporates any more
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.
You can get the address with an API call.. but we charge for convenience. Pays the infra bills.
Also, the _main_ use case of `cloudflared` tunneling is using it as a long-term way to host production websites on your own hostname. the ability to create ad-hoc tunnels is more of a gimmick / advertising opportunity.
0: https://github.com/judge2020/cloudflare-connectivity-test/wi...
Also the lifetime I need the connection open. For something quick, ssh tunnel. For something normies use, reverse proxy. Ain’t trying to teach my parents about IP addresses and port numbers.