Yet another Hacker News

Cloudflare Quick Tunnels

88 points jcbhmr 1 hour ago 51 comments

smalltorch 1 hour ago | parent

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

ZeroCool2u 52 minutes ago | parent

Anything specific to watch out for?

whizzter 48 minutes ago | parent

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

user3939382 55 minutes ago | parent

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

dangoodmanUT 55 minutes ago | parent

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

ThrowawayTestr 53 minutes ago | parent

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

cuu508 45 minutes ago | parent

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

monster_truck 29 minutes ago | parent

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

johng 5 minutes ago | parent

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.

altmanaltman 52 minutes ago | parent

Claude worked overtime on this webpage

kincl 51 minutes ago | parent

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 47 minutes ago | parent

feels more like an ngrok competitor

israrkhan 10 minutes ago | parent

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

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

alasano 10 minutes ago | parent

More like their version of Tailscale funnel I think

ZeroCool2u 51 minutes ago | parent

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 44 minutes ago | parent

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 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

roncesvalles 35 minutes ago | parent

Not many people run their local machine 24/7.

berofeev 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

danserfaty 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

aliasxneo 49 minutes ago | parent

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

afzalive 26 minutes ago | parent

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

simonw 16 minutes ago | parent

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 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

eli 10 minutes ago | parent

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

bix6 7 minutes ago | parent

It’s a concentration of power issue.

ceejayoz 7 minutes ago | parent

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

whizzter 47 minutes ago | parent

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

Imustaskforhelp 44 minutes ago | parent

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)

axus 36 minutes ago | parent

Wow, exfiltrating data has never been easier!

JV00 46 minutes ago | parent

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

daemonologist 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

Narciss 36 minutes ago | parent

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

smalltorch 34 minutes ago | parent

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 27 minutes ago | parent

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 14 minutes ago | parent

>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.

himata4113 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

cute_boi 18 minutes ago | parent

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

xeornet 17 minutes ago | parent

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

rozab 11 minutes ago | parent

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?

tombert 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

TonyStr 7 minutes ago | parent

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?

rplnt 15 minutes ago | parent

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"?

reaperducer 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

lkbm 11 minutes ago | parent

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

rplnt 4 minutes ago | parent

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

075326899532 15 minutes ago | parent

[ad]

israrkhan 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

damsta 10 minutes ago | parent

The website looks broken in dark mode on Firefox.

ggg011012 59 seconds ago | parent

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.