Freelancers: demo client sites from your laptop like they're live

If you build sites for clients, the recurring headache isn’t the building — it’s the showing. You need a URL a client can open, on real HTTPS, that looks and behaves like production, without paying for a staging host per project. ReDock (free, no terminal) lets you run the client’s site locally and share it over a Cloudflare tunnel as a named, persistent URL. This is a workflow guide about what you can ship to clients for review at zero cost — not a claim about rates or pipeline.

The staging problem, stated plainly

Freelancers juggle several client sites at once, each at a different stage. The usual options each have a cost:

• Paid staging hosts charge per site and per month, and you’re renting them the whole time a project is idle.
• Screenshots and screen-shares don’t let the client click around on their own time or on their own phone.
• ngrok free works, but its URLs rotate — the link you sent Monday is dead by Friday, which looks unprofessional in a client thread.

What you actually want is a real URL, on trusted HTTPS, that you control and that stays the same across a project’s life.

The local-first freelance setup

Here’s the shape of it in ReDock:

1. Run each client site locally. WordPress, headless WP, Astro, Next.js, plain PHP — ReDock provisions the runtime, MySQL, and a locally trusted HTTPS .test certificate. The site comes up at something like https://acme-co.test. Nothing installs onto macOS itself; uninstalling ReDock leaves your Mac clean. See /docs/first-site.
2. Keep them side by side. Multiple sites, multiple stacks, one app. You’re not spinning up a VM per client.
3. Share a named review link. Cloudflare tunnels give you unlimited unlisted QuickShare URLs plus 3 named redock.xyz subdomains that persist — so acme-review.redock.xyz still works next week. Details at /docs/sharing.

The client opens a real HTTPS page on any device. It behaves like a live site because it is one — just tunneled from your Mac.

Where the agent saves you hours

The unglamorous parts of client work — installing a form plugin, seeding placeholder content, swapping a theme, wiring a contact form — are exactly what ReDock’s agent surface handles. The whole app is MCP tools on localhost:47200, so Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, or the built-in agent can operate any site. “Install a contact form on the Acme site and put it on the contact page” is one instruction, and every change is visible and reversible.

For WordPress specifically, ReDock does site-level git and one-click plugin branch switching — useful when a client asks “what did the header look like last week?” You keep versioned states of a real site without a separate deploy pipeline. If MCP is unfamiliar, What is MCP? is the primer; /docs/mcp has setup.

When the client says yes

Approval is where local-first pays off again. From inside ReDock, deploy the site to Cloudflare Workers on the free tier, with one custom domain included free. No new hosting account, no migration dance — the deploy-a-website-for-free workflow covers it, and /docs/deploy has the steps.

For the wider zero-cost toolkit — website, automation, video — see the $0 creator stack, and if you’re weighing tools, MAMP alternatives in 2026 compares the local-dev options honestly.

An honest caveat

Local-first means your Mac has to be awake for a tunnel to serve. For a live client demo, that’s fine — you’re at the machine. For always-on staging that a client checks at 2 a.m., you’d deploy to Workers instead. Match the tool to the moment: tunnel for reviews, deploy for anything that must be up around the clock.

FAQ

Will the client’s review URL stay the same for the whole project?

Yes, if you use one of the 3 named redock.xyz subdomains — those persist while you use them. The unlimited QuickShare links are meant for quick one-off shares and are unlisted rather than named.

Can I run several client sites at once?

Yes. ReDock runs multiple sites across different stacks side by side. Each gets its own .test domain and can be shared independently.

Does the demo need my Mac to be on?

For a tunnelled review link, yes — it serves from your machine. Once a project is approved, deploy it to Cloudflare Workers so it’s up independently of your laptop.

Ready to demo client work from your own Mac? Download ReDock.