Mcptunnels
ngrok for MCP with basic OAuth
Details
- External ID
- 49527807
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Mcptunnels
- Website domain
- github.io
- Launched
- Sept. 1, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 15
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6842105263157895
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
Description
Basically, OpenAI tunneling sucks and is broken most of the time. This can get you tunneling pretty trivially to share with someone temporarily. Roadmap includes being able to host MCP servers trivially as well.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Model Context Protocol developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- ngrok alternative for mcp with oauth
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The MCP client wrapper and basic CLI are easy to build, but establishing a robust, low-latency secure reverse proxy and tunneling relay service (similar to ngrok) with OAuth 2.1 bridging requires reliable distributed network infrastructure.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a client CLI (Go/Rust/Node) that connects over a persistent multiplexed TLS/WebSocket connection to a multi-tenant cloud relay server ('tunneld'). The relay requires dynamic subdomain routing, HTTP/SSE stream translation for MCP JSON-RPC messages, rate limiting, and an OAuth 2.1 token authorization layer. Building and operating low-latency public tunneling infrastructure demands seasoned backend networking and reverse-proxy operations experience.
Discussion
4 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: OpenAI tunnels, Skybridge framework
Concerns raised: Signup requirement to avoid spam
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 85 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #27 of 86 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 307 days after the earliest competitor.
- ngrok AI Gateway · ph · 2026-08-05 · 304 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- AuthPlane · hn · 2026-06-17 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Murl · hn · 2026-02-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- ContextVM · hn · 2026-02-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Openstatus MCP Health Checker · ph · 2026-05-30 · 207 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Turn APIs into MCP servers without code · hn · 2025-12-04 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- MCP Gateway · hn · 2025-12-03 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- MCP Server for OpenTelemetry · hn · 2025-11-18 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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