This is part 2 of the Reach launch series. Part 1 introduced the product — what it is and who it's for. Here we go under the hood.

Every TYO product starts from a real problem we hit ourselves. Reach was no different.

The problem

The internet isn't neutral about where you are. Travel overseas and suddenly your Australian bank's app stops working. A streaming service you pay for blocks you because your IP is in the wrong country. Your home NAS, your work systems, your online accounts — many of them have access rules tied to geography that you didn't set and can't easily change.

Privacy is the other side of the same coin. Every website you visit, every service you use, logs your IP address. That address maps back to your ISP, your suburb, often your employer. For individuals and businesses alike, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to not broadcast that information with every request you make.

The options available were either too heavy (a full VPN reroutes everything on your device and requires a server you have to maintain), too opaque (commercial proxy services where you have no idea what's happening to your traffic), or too complicated for everyday use. We wanted something simple, transparent, and under our own control.

So in May 2026 we built the first version ourselves. Within a few weeks it had grown into something worth turning into a proper product.

Why not a VPN?

It's the obvious question. A VPN reroutes everything on your device — every app, every connection, all the time. That's more than most people need, and it comes with overhead: slower connections, battery drain on laptops and phones, and the constant background question of whether you actually want all your traffic going through someone else's server.

Reach is more targeted. It handles your web traffic — the browser, the apps that talk to the web — and leaves everything else alone. You get the location and privacy benefits where you need them, without the blunt instrument of a full VPN.

That distinction is deliberate. Reach isn't trying to replace a VPN. It's built for the specific, everyday problem of your web traffic needing to appear from somewhere other than where you are.

The gateway: streaming, not buffering

The Reach gateway runs on a world-class cloud infrastructure provider with data centres across the Asia-Pacific region. It's built to handle your traffic as fast as possible — pages load quickly, file downloads flow at full speed, and your connection stays secure end-to-end. The gateway routes your traffic without ever seeing the contents of what you're doing.

Metering that makes sense

Every request through the gateway is tracked against your account. Usage is visible in the portal in near real-time — not as a number that updates once a day at midnight.

When you hit your data limit, the gateway doesn't just stop working and leave you with a mysterious connection error. It switches to a limited mode that explains what happened and lets you top up immediately. We've seen how confusing silent failure is in other tools; we designed against it deliberately.

Part 3 covers everything that's shipped since the first version — ZTNA, device trust, China transport, cloud firewall integration, and more. Read it here →