Can this work with the “off the shelf” mesh routers.

Yeah but can it host PiHole?

We have so much computing power at home and the chances you have good reliable Internet at home are better than before. I revived 5 year old PCs and it’s way too much computing power for my self host needs. I’d have to pay $200+ a month for the same compute power in the cloud. Even a Raspberry Pi with 8GB is capable of running quite a bit for fractions of a penny in electricity.

There’s so many services where I’m like, wow what am I even paying for? Email is one where I know exactly what I’m paying for.

Does it support syncing photos from your phone? That’s the only thing I need to get off Google Photos, I love how seamless it is.

You can secure your tunnels using the Access menu and then adding an application. It should be somewhat straight-forward but you’re basically looking to create an access policy and then adding the rules you want. For example a simple one is to add an allow rule for certain emails. When you enter your email an access code will be sent to you before you can access the application resource. That’s just one of many ways to secure it using their application config and access policies.

If you’re comfortable with using Cloudflare, you can use their zero trust tunneling and setup an application layer that adds auth to those services. I have mine protected by my GitHub login.