All 100 ideasServers and DevOps
#41 of 100 · Servers and DevOps
Tailscale without the vendor
Plain WireGuard mesh with automatic keys and NAT traversal, plus self-hosted tunnels that expose a local port, without a vendor server.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay8%
- Want it local or private54%
- Object to subscriptions8%
- Want it open source or self-hosted54%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 13 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for5 Show HN launches do this job, and 12 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- Free, secure dev tunnels with custom domains using Fly and WireGuard2020 · 24 pts
- Webmesh - A fully open-source Tailscale alternative2023 · 7 pts
- I Spent Years Building a FOSS Unified Zero Trust Secure Access Platform2025 · 7 pts
- Octelium – FOSS L7-Aware Zero Trust Access/PaaS Platform over WireGuard2025 · 3 pts
- Octelium – L7-Aware ZeroTrust Remote Access ZTNA over WireGuard and K8s2025 · 2 pts
Instead of: Tailscale, ngrok, WireGuard
The idea, as matched
A minimal, open-source, self-hostable alternative to Tailscale and ngrok: WireGuard mesh with automatic keys and NAT traversal, and tunnels exposing a local port on a public domain, without a vendor's central server.
Jev first matched 15 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 13 of 15.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Mesh and tunnel asks roughly even.
- Oct 2026Wants a minimal Tailscale alternative: plain WireGuard with automatic key exchange, NAT hole-punching and an oblivious relay fallback. Read it: a comment in “Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update”
- Nov 2024Wants a cloudflared tunnel alternative to expose localhost on a public domain, supporting anonymous clients without per-user pricing. Read it: a comment in “Doxx/Darkflare: DarkFlare TCPoCDN (TCP over CDN)”
- Mar 2024Wants cheap indie web hosting that offloads compute-heavy backend work to a home server. Read it: a comment in “Own Your Web – Issue 11: Welcome to the IndieWeb”
- Mar 2023Wants a simple open source, self-hosted version of tunnel services like Ngrok or Tailscale Funnel. Read it: a comment in “Embed a Tailscale Funnel in your Go app”
- Jan 2023Wants an open source Tailscale alternative that is easy, handles CG-NAT, supports iOS, and streams 4K well. Read it: a comment in “Tell HN: Tailscale terms updated, added mandatory arbitration”
- Jun 2022Wants a way to accept incoming connections to an Android phone on LTE behind carrier NAT. Read it: a comment in “Repurposing an old Android phone as a web server”
- Mar 2022Would pay for an own-hosted Tailscale, since Headscale's iOS client only works with the official server. Read it: a comment in “How our free plan stays free”
- Nov 2021Wants to reach a remote machine behind firewalls from a phone, like VNC through a URL. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: What is the easiest way to connect two systems behind firewalls?”
- Sep 2021Wants something like Tailscale that has no central server. Read it: a comment in “Tailscale free for open source projects”
- Mar 2020Asks whether Tailscale has an open source equivalent. Read it: a comment in “How Tailscale Works”
- Aug 2019Wants something that encrypts all traffic between machines in the cloud without the hassle of distributing certificates. Read it: a comment in “Container Networking with Vxlan, BGP and WireGuard”
- Dec 2018Asks for a service like PiTunnel that works for Ubuntu. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: is there a service like PiTunnel.com for Ubuntu?”
- Jun 2014Wants a way to tunnel a local port without needing any relay server. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: zzzz.io, a free DynDNS replacement I created on the weekend”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.