Zero Trust on a $0 Budget, Part 1: Setting Up Cloudflare One's Free Plan

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Until this week, I had no remote access setup at all. No VPN, no port forwards, no filtering. My Mac was protected by whatever network it happened to be on: home Wi-Fi, a coffee shop, an airport.

So I set up Cloudflare One, Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform, on its free plan. One evening, $0. I expected it to be “install a VPN app and click connect.” It wasn’t. The first evening was mostly about understanding the control plane: who can enroll, how the device is configured, what traffic goes where, and what an app should require before it lets you in.

Split Tunneling on CybersecurityOS

Zero Trust on a $0 Budget, Part 1: Setting Up Cloudflare One's Free Plan