Hacker ApprovedDepartments

cloudflared

Hacker Approved

Tunnel client in Hosting & cloud

Easy way to expose self-hosted services from home through a Cloudflare tunnel. Caveat: free tunnels sometimes flake.

Easy way to expose self-hosted services from home through a Cloudflare tunnel. Caveat: free tunnels sometimes flake.

11 people gave an opinion

recommend it
10
criticize it
1
approval share
91%
Each figure is one person. RecommendsCriticizes

Recommended in 7 of 13 months

  1. November 2025: recommended
  2. December 2025: not recommended
  3. January 2026: recommended
  4. February 2026: not recommended
  5. March 2026: recommended
  6. April 2026: recommended
  7. May 2026: recommended
  8. June 2026: not recommended
  9. July 2026: not recommended
  10. August 2026: recommended
  11. September 2026: recommended
  12. October 2026: not recommended
  13. November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)

Why it carries the badge

  • 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
  • 10 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
  • Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.

The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works

What people say about it

The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.

Why people recommend it

Each mark is one comment

  • Quick, easy setup

    “I got the cloudflared running fairly easily (though their Debian package repo seemed broken”

    Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)”

    “got a working tunnel in like 15 seconds”

    Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”
  • Exposes home-hosted services

    “use cloudflared and a cheap Lenovo Tiny box to host from my house”

    Comment from 26 Aug 2026 in “Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month”

    “It's what cloudflared and services like it are designed for.”

    Comment from 12 Jan 2026 in “2026 is the Year of Self-hosting”

    “expose it via cloudflared so you can use it on the go”

    Comment from 16 Aug 2026 in “Claude Seems Down”

What people warn about

Each mark is one comment

  • Free tunnels sometimes flake

    “CF free tunnels sometimes flake”

    Comment from 1 May 2026 in “GhostBox – disposable little machines from the Global Free Tier.”
  • Debian package repo seemed broken

    “I got the cloudflared running fairly easily (though their Debian package repo seemed broken”

    Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)”

What people said

11 of the 12 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.

“got a working tunnel in like 15 seconds”

RecommendsComment from 18 Sep 2026 in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels”

“use cloudflared and a cheap Lenovo Tiny box to host from my house”

RecommendsComment from 26 Aug 2026 in “Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month”

“expose it via cloudflared so you can use it on the go”

RecommendsComment from 16 Aug 2026 in “Claude Seems Down”

“I am really happy with the setup. (So far)”

RecommendsComment from 27 May 2026 in “Show HN: Posthorn, self-hosted mail without the mail server”

“CF free tunnels sometimes flake”

MixedComment from 1 May 2026 in “GhostBox – disposable little machines from the Global Free Tier.”

“With cloudflared, Cloudflare terminates TLS at their edge.”

MixedComment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)”

“Termux has clouflared package which is the thing you need to set up a secure ssh tunnel through cloudflare”

RecommendsComment from 24 Mar 2026 in “iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM”

“you might want to try a cloudflared tunnel”

RecommendsComment from 22 Jan 2026 in “From Stealth Blackout to Whitelisting: Inside the Iranian Shutdown”

“It's what cloudflared and services like it are designed for.”

RecommendsComment from 12 Jan 2026 in “2026 is the Year of Self-hosting”

“today I got to pay for it”

CriticizesComment from 18 Nov 2025 in “Do not put your site behind Cloudflare if you don't need to”

“I got the cloudflared running fairly easily (though their Debian package repo seemed broken”

MixedComment from 3 Nov 2025 in “Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)”

Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.