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Comment by jeremejevs | Hacker News Reader

Nice tool, but without committing for annual billing (which I don't intend to do, not for the first year of usage) it's $10 a month. My internet connection, my mobile plan, my Photoshop & Lightroom subscription, a huge collection of music (Spotify), 3K~5K movies and TV shows (Netflix), etc., all cost approximately the same. I mean, sure, $120 a year is pocket change for somebody using Ngrok professionally, but that's still super disproportional, compared to, say, monster of a piece of software like Photoshop. I'd probably subscribe for $2, but otherwise, IMO, frp [0] on a $3 VPS [1] is better value, with the extra benefit of being FOSS and having zero limits.

[0] https://github.com/fatedier/frp

[1] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing

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You can use ngrok without paying, you just get weird domains like n56897as.ngrok.com (this is off the top of my head, idk how close I got to a real one). This works fine most of the time.

Custom subdomains are available for non-paying users too. You just need to create a free account.

That isn't true for ngrok2. Ngrok 1 allowed for this but has been sunset.

It's absolutely possible. Admittedly I'm still running 2.1.18, but I just tested it there and it still works.

https://ngrok.com/docs#subdomain

edit: Just in case, I updated to 2.2.4 (newest) and it's still possible to use custom subdomains.

This doesn't work. I just checked.

Tunnel session failed: Only paid plans may bind custom subdomains. Failed to bind the custom subdomain 'blahblahblah' for the account xxx

Strange. Did you have the account back when it was still possible? They may have grandfathered the older accounts in.

I do this on my MacBook. If I shut the lid with it online, it comes back online to the same URL. This allows me to update my URL very infrequently.

I came here to mention Scaleway ARM servers which cost 3/mo with unlimited bandwidth. With reverse SSH tunneling, there's no need for a dedicated service.

This issue gets worse if you use multiple such services. Alone they’re worth it, but combined...

IRCCloud (4$) + ngrok (10$) + some free libre email provider (5$) + 1TB cloud storage (10-12$) + ...

The combined cost for me is enough that it’s cheaper to rent a dedicated octacore xeon with 16G ram, 250G SSD and 1TB HDD and unlimited traffic with a 1Gbps line[1], and run my own services. In fact, I pay less than 50% of what I’d pay for the services, I have far more performance, and can offer these services to 10 people at no cost, and still come in better.

These services might be worth it if you’re in SV, but 10$/mo is something different to a person earning 300k$/year in SV, and to a student earning 8k$/year somewhere else.

    ________________________

[1] Server price and performance comparisons between several hosters, previously featured on HN: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...

The 4 core ARM would probably be sufficient for what you listed, unless you anticipate touching the data going through (e.g. transcoding videos etc)

Yup, that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Transcoding video, even on the fly (after I had several situations where lag with Twitch was massive, and with nginx-rtmp and nginx-hls it was nil)

Not sure it's fair for you to compare a small SaaS business to Netflix in terms of pricing. People have bills to pay.

I used the free plan for a while but having a reserved subdomain is pretty sweet. And the cost for a whole year of it is fairly small in my opinion.

People having bills is irrelevant to consumers. If your product pricing relies on pitching a sob story about how you're a small indy developer, you've failed.

This comes off as really petty. It's good software that saves you a ton of time and effort. You spend $10 without thinking about it in tons of other places. If anything I think he should charge more

The amount of time spent thinking about this and setting up an alternative vs just using ngrok, when billed at your market hourly rate, is far more than $10. This shouldn't be a real issue.

"Time spent thinking" counts for Ngrok too: comparing alternatives is a pragmatic thing to do, before pulling a trigger on something. Not to mention that this is all part of reading Hacker News (I found frp through some previous thread).

Setting up a VPS with frp on it would take 30 minutes tops (assuming that I don't already have one and that I'm in no hurry). Even if I was some big shot, doing $120 an hour, that's just 60 / (10 - 3) = 8.5 months of Ngrok. These $60 would be a good investment by my book.

But I'm not counting pennies here, I'm merely pointing out that the pricing is unreasonable. I can afford it, but its usefulness per dollar is disappointing.

For example, compose.com can host a Pg database for $17, one master and one slave, with automatic backups, a rich control panel, competent customer support, batteries included. It's maybe only twice as expensive as replicating the setup on your own (which would take literally weeks for a single person), and brings almost as much value as hiring a sysadmin. And then there's Ngrok, 3-4 times as expensive as DIY, while saving you a total of 30-60 minutes of one-time effort. And costs more than a half of a pretty great Pg server. Ridiculous.

Props to the people behind Ngrok, if they're in the black with this pricing. Good strategy/marketing.

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