Superior UI/UX offered by centralized systems is why everything is being centralized.
People will trade everything including privacy and security for ease of use. The market has shown this time and time again.
Your users don't really care about decentralized utopia when your service doesn't work.
I guess bots are hitting CF IPs at large and therefore services might be disrupted?
But if your service is in a category that attracts ddos (like a forum or game) and you ever get enough traction for someone to care (doesn’t take much), it might surprise you how cheap it is to take you down and how limited your options are against a simple volumetric attack.
Cloudflare Tunnel has gotten good enough there aren't a lot of ways to be better left. A couple would be offering e2ee and a less stringent ToS (technically anything other than normal HTML websites is not permitted, though I'm not aware of this ever being enforced, yet).
When someone uses the tunnel, they never have to go outside of cloudflare. Since the traffic ( i suspect) would stay very local.
Perhaps it could be even cheaper in the end for them.
I wasn't talking about the development/maintenance.
[1]: https://inlets.dev/
I like to have several environments on my laptop, each with a different Ingress and Let's Encrypt certificate, accessible from the public Internet whether I am at home or at Starbucks. If Grandma's mac has 4G of ram, she can do it too!
Either way, I’ve built my own solution in go and if that doesn’t work out I also have cloudflared now. inlets is cool, but it is not revolutionary tech that can not be replicated and 20 dollars a month is mighty much for convenience, which would be hampered again by me having to throw a license key at every instance and being unable to share my config easily and reproducibly. And that ultimately matters a lot to me.
First of all, it's not "a" tunnel. It's however many you need to access the applications on your private network... which could be your laptop. It's not for everyone, but if you're running lots of apps on, say, your laptop and you want to have TLS everywhere, none of the comparably priced options come close.