Unlike ngrok, and they are a great product, I have used them for years, we are completely open source. Further we are peer to peer, so if you and the other party both want to communicate, you can do it without any dependency on a third party/company.

The last bit requires some explanation, but this is provided by iroh, this is not our innovation, we have simply used iroh and benefitted from it, you can read about their node discover process here [1], there is some initial reliance on a relay, which is currently run by them, and we hope to run our own relays in future.

Right now the way it works is `malai http 3000` listens over iroh, and creates a public private key pair, public part of the key is used as node identity, which we call id52 (52 char public key, default iroh public key representation are 64 char and not suitable for using as a subdomain).

Then on kulfi.site server, `malai http-bridge` runs, which starts an HTTP server, and any request that comes for `<id52>.kulfi.site` lands on this HTTP server, which then connects to `malai http` instance over iroh network using the id52[2]:

`malai http` gets the HTTP request payload, and makes a HTTP request to the port 3000 (on localhost), and sends the request, and then the return is returned back all the way from malai http to malai http-bridge to the client who made the original request.

We are currently running an instance of the `malai http-bridge` on `kulfi.site`, and you can run your own if you do not trust us for example, go ahead, we encourage it, not for trust, but so it keeps our bandwidth bills down.

But you do not have to use the http bridge, you can run `malai browse kulfi://<id52>`, and it will start a local http-bridge (it will run single target node as for localhost you can not use subdomains to extract the id52 from, which is why you have to pass it on CLI). `malai browse` opens a HTTP server on some random port, and opens your default browser with it, and rest works the same.

If you are curious, kulfi is the main project, we are creating a tauri powered web browser, which will directly speak iroh, and will not require the http bridge, the http request from browser will straight go over iroh network to the other side.

[1]: https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-global-node-discovery

[2]: https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-dns