I run a DNS company (some of you can probably guess which one), and a few weeks ago one of my nephews was showing me his home setup and asking about local tunnels.

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.)