Queue Mode + Lottery Mode
Fair line or equal-odds draw
FIFO position and ETA, or a lottery pool with odds. Switch live from the control room.
Open source · Fair queues
TideGuard
A fair waiting room for traffic surges. Visitors join a FIFO queue on the edge; your origin only sees the rate you admit.
The path through the surge
TideGuard is a corridor, not a dashboard. Traffic enters, holds, and exits at the rate your origin can survive.
Join
Every visitor enters the same FIFO line. No VIP cuts, no randomized order. Durable Objects keep that order strongly consistent for one named queue.
Wait
Heartbeats keep the line honest. Silent clients drop out. ETA stays pluggable so you can show a calm estimate without flooding your origin.
Admit
Admission is a controlled rate. Signed HMAC tokens prove a visitor earned their turn, then expire so capacity cannot leak past your policy.
Capabilities
Admission at the edge, a control room for the launch, and the knobs that set capacity and cost — without a managed waiting-room bill.
HMAC admission tokens
Signed, time-limited access
Admitted visitors carry a token (cookie, Bearer, or query). No session database on your origin.
Admin control room
Brand, pace, watch
Wizard onboarding, live branding preview, traffic controls, live queue metrics, and 5-minute analytics charts.
Origin proxy
Sit in front of the site
Gate paths at the edge. Unauthenticated traffic hits the waiting room; admitted traffic is proxied upstream.
IP allowlist + Pass queue
Staff skip the line
Fixed office IPs bypass without consuming capacity. Pass queue mints a cookie for this browser to smoke-test.
Temporary country block
Event-window geo gate
Block by CF-IPCountry with a TTL. Allowlist and Pass queue still override. Hit counters show in Live queue.
Full capabilitiesAdmission, control room, access gates, settings./demoFull page, widget, and API client (simulated)./costEstimate Cloudflare spend for your next drop.
Hold the line on Black Friday
Clone the repo, set your admit rate, and put a fair queue in front of the origin that cannot take everyone at once. Control room tools — allowlist, geo gate, analytics — ship in the same Worker.