GoKawiilIn a nutshell: Sharing a dev project running on your own machine with someone on the other side of the internet has always been a small ordeal: deploy it somewhere, wrestle with port forwarding, or talk a client through a VPN. There's a free Cloudflare one-command fix for this however that just went viral among developers... five years after it shipped.
"Put localhost on the Internet," was the new pitch for an old feature that had Cloudflare at the top of Hacker News and X's dev circles for the last few days. The tool has existed since 2021, and let's you run one command: cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8000, and whatever is running on your machine gets a public, encrypted address on trycloudflare.com.
No account, no DNS records, no poking holes in your router. When you kill the process, the URL dies with it. For anyone who has ever needed to show a client a half-finished build, the appeal is obvious. The rediscovery of the old tool drew variations of two reactions: people who had never heard of this and had a use for it that same day, and people who had been quietly using it for years and were baffled to see it treated as news.
– Suganthan Mohanadasan (@suganthan) September 20, 2026
Cloudflare shipped Quick Tunnels in September 2021, built by a summer intern, and an account-free version existed even earlier under the old Argo Tunnel name. What changed this time is how the company marketed it again, with a new landing page that HN promptly dismantled as something that had apparently come out of a chatbot.
But regardless of this, we thought it was worth mentioning because many developers seemed genuinely surprised that this could solve a daily problem. Cloudflare, meanwhile, is repositioning the tool for the "agent era," complete with JSON output so a coding agent can read the generated URL. Developers in the thread wanted precisely that: a way to give a remote AI agent a reachable endpoint for something running on a machine at home.
– onur ozcan (@oozn) September 20, 2026
The big catch is the same one that always applied. That URL is public and bots tend to find it fast. Security firms have spent two years documenting criminals abusing the free, anonymous version to stage malware. ngrok's founder, who invented this category, turned up in the thread to say his company killed anonymous tunnels years ago because the abuse wasn't worth it. But granted, treated as a temporary solution for a temporary problem, it should do the trick.