I did go through this list a few months ago and found most options lacking. But Cloudflare tunnel was still bound to having an Argo subscription back then. (To be fair, their pricing page is still very confusing on this)
Ok, I'm confused... you went through a bunch of awesome solutions and you found them lacking; but the modest price of inlets is unacceptable?
If Tailscale works for you, then you don't need Inlets.
I like to have several environments on my laptop, each with a different Ingress and Let's Encrypt certificate, accessible from the public Internet whether I am at home or at Starbucks.
If Grandma's mac has 4G of ram, she can do it too!
That you’d think 20 dollars a month is an acceptable price for this tells me that you’re either in the valley, are Alex Ellis or both.
Either way, I’ve built my own solution in go and if that doesn’t work out I also have cloudflared now. inlets is cool, but it is not revolutionary tech that can not be replicated and 20 dollars a month is mighty much for convenience, which would be hampered again by me having to throw a license key at every instance and being unable to share my config easily and reproducibly. And that ultimately matters a lot to me.
If you wouldn't mind opening an issue (or posting on forum.indiebits.io) and sharing anything you learned that's not already in the list it would be very helpful. I don't have time to try them all in depth.
Ummm... you haven't used Inlets, have you?
But seriously, folks who use Inlets have typically tried a bunch of the obvious solutions and end up there when all else has failed them.
First of all, it's not "a" tunnel. It's however many you need to access the applications on your private network... which could be your laptop.
It's not for everyone, but if you're running lots of apps on, say, your laptop and you want to have TLS everywhere, none of the comparably priced options come close.