FAQ
Questions operators ask first
Cost, admission, and deploy, without the sales detour. Each answer has a stable link you can share (for example from the cost calculator).
Is it free?
Yes. TideGuard is MIT-licensed open-source software. You do not pay us to run it.
You still pay Cloudflare for the Workers and Durable Objects usage on your account, the same way any Worker does. The cost calculator estimates that infrastructure only.
How is this different from other systems?
With TideGuard you own the waiting room. You deploy it on your Cloudflare account, keep the code, and pay only for the infrastructure you actually use.
Most commercial waiting rooms sell a managed service with opaque pricing, so a fair side-by-side cost comparison is hard. Here the software is free and the Cloudflare bill is something you can estimate before the surge.
Longer queues does not cost more?
If the same crowd each waits the same average time, total person-time in line is fixed: people × average wait. Stretching a ticket drop from one hour to five does not invent extra heartbeats; it spreads the same waits over a longer window.
That is Little’s law in plain clothes: average concurrent in line ≈ arrival rate × wait. Hold people and wait steady, stretch the sale, and concurrency falls while total wait-time (and poll/heartbeat volume) stays put. Dollars follow person-time and request counts, not how long the calendar says the room was open.
What does the cost calculator measure?
Cloudflare infrastructure for one surge: Worker requests, Worker CPU, Durable Object requests, plus the Workers Paid base fee on your account.
It does not include your origin servers, third-party CDNs outside Cloudflare, or SQLite storage overages. TideGuard the license stays $0.
How does admission work?
Visitors join a named queue owned by a Durable Object. In Queue Mode, admission is FIFO: first in, first out, so the person who joined earliest is admitted next. In Lottery Mode, each admit picks uniformly at random among everyone still waiting.
When someone is admitted, TideGuard issues a time-limited HMAC token so the protected page can trust access without a session database.
Do I have to rewrite my origin app?
No. TideGuard sits in front as a waiting room and optional origin proxy. Visitors wait at the edge, then continue with a signed admission token — or TideGuard proxies admitted traffic to your upstream URL.
You configure admit rate, branding, and which paths to protect; your origin keeps serving once people are let through at a rate it can handle.
Where does queue state live?
Authoritative queue state lives in a Durable Object per queue name: joins, leaves, heartbeats, and admits are strongly consistent there.
KV is for configuration and branding, not the hot path. Status polls and heartbeats do not write KV.
Can I brand the waiting room?
Yes. The admin setup wizard covers colors, copy, font, and whether to show waiting depth, with a live preview before you save.
Tokens are CSS variables, so branding changes without rewriting the waiting-room layout.
What can operators do in the control room?
After setup, /admin is the launch desk: live queue metrics, traffic controls (opening time, silent pause, origin health), origin proxy, IP allowlist, Pass queue, temporary country block, and analytics charts for queue depth and geo hits.
Charts use 5-minute intervals from live metrics in the operator browser (1h / 12h / 24h). Changing the range does not add Durable Object load. Full list: /capabilities.
Can staff skip the queue? Can I block countries for an event?
Yes. An IP allowlist matches CF-Connecting-IP on proxied traffic so office networks skip the line without consuming a concurrent slot. Pass queue issues an admission cookie for the current admin browser to smoke-test the protected app.
Country block is a temporary CF-IPCountry gate with a TTL for event windows. Allowlist and Pass queue still override. It is not a substitute for Cloudflare WAF.
Can I try a demo without deploying?
Yes. The site demos at /demo show a full-page waiting room, an embeddable widget, and a custom UI on join/status shaped JSON — including a simulate geo-block control.
Those pages simulate queue progression with the real TideGuard look. They are not connected to a live Worker yet.
Who builds TideGuard?
TideGuard is being developed by Mikkel Scheike and Victor Scheike. Profiles are on the About page at /about.
How do I deploy?
Use Deploy to Cloudflare from the GitHub repo, or clone and run wrangler deploy. Set the TOKEN_SECRET secret, open /admin for the setup wizard, then protect a page or use /demo.
Full steps live in the repository docs under getting started.