One-click reverse proxy with custom domains for homelab self-hosters
Self-hosters posting in r/selfhosted and on HN State of Homelab 2026 want a simpler, open-source Cloudflare Tunnel replacement that lets them expose Jellyfin, Immich, and similar apps on their own domain without violating streaming ToS. Existing tools either require deep networking knowledge or force reliance on a single commercial gateway.
builder note
The homelab crowd will never pay for the tunnel itself. They will pay for the dashboard, the LetsEncrypt automation, and the 'oh shit my DNS broke' recovery. Sell the control plane, open-source the data plane.
landscape (4 existing solutions)
Plenty of open-source plumbing exists but none of it is packaged as a turnkey product with a UI your less-technical homelab friend could run.
Pangolin Promising but still pre-1.0, no polished UI for non-sysadmins
Boring Proxy Works but abandoned-looking, no multi-tenant dashboard
Rathole High-performance tunnel but CLI-only, no domain-management UI
Cloudflare Tunnel Violates Cloudflare ToS for video streaming and forces dependency on a single vendor
sources (2)
hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47746577 "cloudflare tunnels are great until they arent... need a self-hosted equivalent" 2026-04-08
reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ "recurring weekly threads about tunnel ToS for media apps" 2026-04-15