The variant version of number 2, which is more work to set up of course, is Pangolin on a VPS. Basically serves the same purpose but skips Cloudflare entirely.
I’m in the process of setting up Pangolin and Headscale on a VPS to expose a small handful of services and to replace my wg-easy setup. Currently chaining wg-easy through a gluetun container, so with a single VPN connection I get LAN access and protect my outbound traffic, but I can’t for the life of me get the same setup working on wg-easy v15, so I’m going to give tailscale/headscale a try with a gluetun exit node.
BruisedMoose@piefed.social 2 days ago
I'm in camp #2. Only my Gmail address can access my apps from outside my home. It's a little bit of a pain to configure the rules, but once it's done it's done. I've been happy with it.
You do need to have a domain name though.
damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world 2 days ago
pretty cheap to get a domain name through Cloudflare too - nine bucks a year for a .com , I think? Just get something completely personal or completely random! :D They even have a way to get emails routed to your general inbox. It’s fugly, but it works!