He already knew about Cloudflare Tunnels. I mentioned ngrok, localtunnel, etc., and then I started thinking about what a super-lightweight tunneling client might look like if it were optimized for clawbots, MCP servers, dashboards, and random services people are increasingly running on home networks and minis.
And then I remembered I owned the tunnel.to domain name.
At that point the idea kind of lodged in my brain and refused to leave until I built the thing.
Current state:
- lightweight relay-based tunnel service
- CLI-first
- public relay nodes in North America + Europe
- TLS
- no account required for basic usage
- intended to be dead simple to expose localhost services
Right now it’s centralized. Early days, but it's entirely doable to add:
- self-hosted relays
- private relays
- agent-oriented workflows
- lightweight auth/access controls
- better relay selection/failover
Given my background I'm also in a good position to preempt abuse, so it doesn't become a timesuck. The no-registration level assigns sub-hostnames so people can't set up obvious phishing sites.
(And yes, I told my nephew about it after it was finished. He said “cool”. Hasn’t used it yet.)