How Is It Different from Tunnels and VPNs?
Reverse-proxy and tunneling tools such as ngrok and Cloudflare Tunnel route traffic through an intermediate relay server. That extra hop can add latency, limit throughput, create bandwidth costs, and put a third-party provider in the traffic path. They also work by publishing a public endpoint: the service becomes reachable from the entire internet by anyone with the address unless access controls are added at the relay. And because the relay typically terminates TLS for HTTPS endpoints, the provider handles the traffic in plaintext unless the service supplies its own end-to-end encryption.
Mesh VPNs such as Tailscale connect entire devices into a private overlay network — but a reachable network is not the same as visible services. Nothing lists what is available: each user must already know which machine hosts a service and connect with the right address and port. And when you want to share only specific services — not the entire computer — across multiple administrators, careful access-control configuration and coordination are often required. Those access rules belong to the network's administrator, not to the person whose computer joins: under the default policy a joined device is reachable on every port, and beyond the device's own firewall the owner's controls are limited to blocking all incoming connections or leaving.
With MTCode DirectLink, users need one app — MTCode Portal — and one account. Authorized services from every administrator appear automatically in one interface, ready to use without network configuration. Access is granted to individual services, not entire computers — and neither server nor client computers join any network or expose anything. Connections are established only for the specific services in use.
