News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels. Parent comment

Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by killingtime74 on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:12PM (#45948016)
For many homelabbers, just being cheap and avoiding the $3 VPS, that's it
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by comrh on Sunday November 16, 2025 @03:20PM (#45948073)
I dont even pay anything, my tiny homelab is completely covered by the free tier
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by kohbo on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:02PM (#45948827)
What provider still has decent free tier?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by antonkochubey on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:07PM (#45948862)
Oracle. 4 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD. It’s arm64 but nowadays that doesn’t really matter.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by Incipient on Sunday November 16, 2025 @06:29PM (#45949432)
That can't possibly be free?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by renewiltord on Sunday November 16, 2025 @08:58PM (#45950239)
That’s generous but Oracle is very generous.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by jazzyjackson on Sunday November 16, 2025 @09:32PM (#45950383)
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Only caveat I see is they reserve the right to delete underutilized/ idling instances

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by siwatanejo on Monday November 17, 2025 @02:23AM (#45951516)
I guess they require a credit card before accessing that free tier?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by ranguna on Monday November 17, 2025 @03:54PM (#45958161)
If they do: create a virtual one, create an account with it and delete the card right after.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by ranguna on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @03:53AM (#45977273)
An honest advise being down-voted?

Thanks

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by siwatanejo on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @10:17PM (#45988493)
I upvoted you.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by gear54rus on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:30PM (#45949062)
Which region were you able to create this in? They seem to be out of capacity all the time in EU.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by jnsaff2 on Monday November 17, 2025 @04:13AM (#45952032)
I have read that you need to write a script to constantly bombard their API in order to get one. I presume you'd be fighting other scripts.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by petronic on Monday November 17, 2025 @10:55AM (#45954711)
What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)

The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.

I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.

Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by Peacefulz on Monday November 17, 2025 @01:26PM (#45956373)
I hit the same roadblock as the above user and it never occurred to me to just cross the barrier with cash and then scale back to free. Thanks for this.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by elantile on Monday November 17, 2025 @05:43PM (#45959263)
It doesn't actually charge you anything. You just have to put a card down to be considered a priority because now you potentially can spend money & therefore are more important then the other free-tier losers. /s It's still free tier & still free.

The free tier is also based on capcity usage, and not instances. If you want 3 cores on 1 machine & 1 on another, they're cool with that. I personally run Pangolin on a 1 core & self-hosted github runners on a 3 core.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels by anon7000 on Sunday November 16, 2025 @09:06PM (#45950265)
Exactly, just today I set up a cloudflare tunnel to a docker compose service running on my home server. I didn’t want to expose the server directly to the internet, and I want to share this service on a certain domain with broader family.

I have a server at home that works well. I don’t reaaaally want to pay an extra $30-$40/yr and have an extra thing to manage when the CF tunnel works fine for free. I like Tailscale more, but I want to share this with family who won’t install TS and also want to use a specific domain.

[ Parent | on HN ]