Tailscale as an ngrok / local tunnel / Cloudflare Tunnel alternative

If you've ever needed to let a third-party service talk to your local dev environment, you've probably reached for ngrok. I've been moving some of that over to Tailscale Funnel instead — here's what works, what broke, and how it stacks up against Cloudflare Tunnel. Key takeaways Tailscale Funnel exposes a local dev server to the public internet, similar to ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnel — useful for testing webhooks, payment callbacks, or anything a third party needs to reach on your machine. It's free for solo/small use, with no device limit on the Personal plan (up to 6 users). tailscale serve is tailnet-private; tailscale funnel is what actually makes something public — easy to mix up. Getting it working behind Caddy + Symfony in Docker means fixing two separate redirect loops (one from Symfony, one from Caddy's own auto-HTTPS) and explicitly telling Symfony to trust the proxy. The one real trade-off versus Cloudflare Tunnel: no custom domain with a valid cert — you're stuck with the ts.net hostname unless you accept a browser cert warning. This isn't a "ngrok / local tunnel / Cloudflare tunnel is bad" post. It's a "here's another tool that does the same job, and here's exactly what broke when I set it up" post. Why bother? A few reasons I looked at Tailscale instead of just defaulting to ngrok again: Stable hostname. ngrok's free tier gives you a random URL that changes every time you restart it. Tailscale Funnel gives you a fixed hostname tied to your machine ( your-machine.your-tailnet.ts.net ) that doesn't change. Genuinely free for solo/small use. Tailscale's free Personal plan covers up to 6 users with no device limit at all — plenty for a solo dev juggling a laptop, a desktop, and a couple of test machines. No "3 device" ceiling to bump into. Already in my toolchain. I use Tailscale for other things, so there's no new account, no new pricing tier to think about. Automatic HTTPS. Tailscale handles certificate provisioning for you — no separate cert step. The tr