Tailscale & Tailscale Funnel — Worth Knowing About

If you’ve ever wanted to share something running on your home machine with the outside world — or securely connect your devices without messing with port forwarding — Tailscale is worth 10 minutes of your time.

What is Tailscale?

Tailscale is a VPN, but not the kind you’re probably thinking of. Traditional VPNs funnel all your traffic through a central server. Tailscale instead creates a mesh network — every device (your home PC, laptop, phone, even a Raspberry Pi) talks directly to every other device, encrypted end-to-end using WireGuard under the hood. Once installed, your devices get their own private IPs (in the 100.x.x.x range) that only you can see. No port forwarding, no firewall rules, no fuss.

It’s free for personal use, works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android — even routers.

Note:  Tailscale even works with CGNAT, like T-Mobile Internet; where you are unable to use port forwarding!

What is Tailscale Funnel?

This is the part a lot of people haven’t heard of. Funnel lets you expose a service running on your machine to the public internet — without opening any ports on your router.

You might have heard of ngrok or Expose — tools that create a temporary public tunnel to your local machine. Funnel is similar in concept, but with some meaningful differences:

It’s built into Tailscale — no separate account or tool needed
You get a real, stable HTTPS URL (like https://yourname.ts.net) — not a random string that changes every session
TLS is handled automatically — valid certificates, no self-signed cert headaches
No relay dependency for your private network — Funnel is only for public exposure; your Tailscale devices still talk peer-to-peer

The catch: Funnel is for serving content publicly (a web app, a local weather station dashboard, a Home Assistant instance). It’s not a general-purpose proxy for every use case, and it does route public traffic through Tailscale’s servers (unlike your private tailnet traffic).

Common use case: Running a local weather display or data logger you want to share with family, or access remotely without a static IP or DDNS gymnastics.

Worth a look: tailscale.com
William