We launched Quick Tunnels in 2021 to give developers an easy way to share their latest service, application, or project running in their local development environment. A lot has changed since then, but the core use case remains the same.
Your coding agent has just finished the feature. The dev server is up on localhost:5173, and before you ask, the agent offers to let you try it on your phone. It runs one command and hands you a link:
That command starts a Quick Tunnel. cloudflared, Cloudflare's lightweight connector, publishes your local service at a random trycloudflare.com URL. No account, no domain, no cost. Agents now use Quick Tunnels for the same reason people do: they are the shortest path from a local port to a URL.
The catch has always been the same. Anyone with the link can open it.
Starting with cloudflared 2026.9.3, you can add --allowed-mail to the command, and your Quick Tunnel only lets in the email addresses and domains you choose. Visitors prove they own one of those addresses with a one-time PIN from Cloudflare Access. Nobody, on either side, needs a Cloudflare account.
Agents made Quick Tunnels more popular than ever
Agents that write code need somewhere to show you the result. Agents that live on a Mac mini at home need to be reachable from your phone. Model Context Protocol servers on a laptop need a public endpoint before a hosted assistant can call them. Each of these needs a URL, and a Quick Tunnel produces one from a single command an agent can run by itself. There is no signup form for it to get stuck on. Add --output json and every log line becomes a JSON object, so the agent can pick out the URL without scraping text.
Since agents took off, Cloudflare Tunnel and Quick Tunnels adoption has grown exponentially. On September 18, 2026, a link t
…
Source: Cloudflare Blog (Published: Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:00:00 GMT). Read the full article on the original site.
