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Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

Ngrok was really cool since I never thought about reverse proxying my localhost before l tried it.

But for the price of ngrok I'm paying for a domain and a 2gb ram/2 CPU VM on hetzner and using SSH tunnels to nginx reverse proxy.

And setting up a shared server for a team with subdomains is just 10 mins of config changes per user - no way they can justify the cost for me.

If it was some symbolic price like 20$/year then I wouldn't bother, otherwise I'll take the VM I can load other random dev crap to when I need it.

And you're using standard web tech to set this up - if you aren't familiar with something required to set this up you will be better off learning it in the long run (if you're the target audience for ngrok) : VM setup, nginx, reverse proxy, SSH tunneling, let's encrypt, domain management/DNS - all valuable fundamental skills to acquire on a small project.

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As a developer and business owner, I literally can't comprehend this response. I can't imagine idea of having to manage yet another server over running

    ngrok http 8000 -subdomain=my-custom-subdomain

from the root of my application (which is wrapped in a single line shell script). For a business, paying $10/dev/month for ngrok is a rounding error.

I also think one should razor sharp focus on delivering customer value to be successful instead of introducing new tech you need to manage.

You probably don't need to manage another server. ngrok's functonality can easily be containerized for easy self-deployment on infrastructure.

> For a business, paying $10/dev/month for ngrok is a rounding error.

$10 here, $10 there, and next thing you know every unix command line app I'm running is charging $10.

You should start thinking of your own time this way. Everyone has an hourly rate, how much do you spend solving problems like this?

Yes but 1) I enjoy solving problems like this and 2) I’m not working and being paid for all that extra free time I have anyways. There is also a non-zero intangible cost to offloading all tasks. Based on your rationale a highly paid Google engineer would have a maid, chef, and Ikea furniture assembler and the only thing the guy would do is code all day because that’s the maximum value use of his/her time. Obviously most people do not do that. I’d probably pay up to $100 per day to a toilet paper monopoly so that I didn’t have to use my hands everyday. Luckily toilet paper isn’t in a monopoly situation, so I’m not going to hand over $100/day to Charmin even though that’s the value I get from their product.

But I think that point is moot because a service that costs $X in perpetuity must justify its costs with continuous new features and must be compared to alternatives. If I just wanted a basic proxy I’d run one of the open source alternatives in a container. If it required too much work, make a contribution to the project to make it easier for everyone. The value of ngrok is in its extra features, but the bulk of the cost is probably in setting up an actual VM and running it, which isn’t that hard these days and can be automated even in an open source offering. When considering the value of ngrok you can’t simply justify it by saying how much time it saves you. You have to compare it to the market, which includes free open source alternatives. So the real question to ask is whether the added features of ngrok plus the time savings over using some open source alternative is worth the extra cost over the time span I’d be using it. If time span is infinite, then maybe it makes sense to do a one-time extra cost of learning how to setup an open source alternative and paying a bit less for the actual VM costs. Maybe ngrok’s added features are indeed worth paying for. But telling yourself your time is not worth looking into this is a lazy justification for unnecessary subscriptions.

This response only makes sense if you are not into DevOps, which I think you should as a developer. Take a random server exposed to the internet, use caddy or treafik to setup a reverse proxy. It takes like 20 seconds to create a reverse proxy to a random host connected via ssh.

Even easier, create predefined ports in caddy and connect to those via ssh. Assign domains to them like proxy<1-1000>.example.com. Connect to one via ssh that is free. Done. That's 2 seconds once it is setup.

Even easier and cheaper if you do not have a "random server exposed to the internet", take one of the alternatives shown by op which allows to deploy a digital ocean or Hetzner vm automatically. Done, like a few seconds from the command line.

10$ a month for something like this is over priced but I guess you prove that it is a valid business.

What you are describing is “easy” if it’s something you practice regularly. It would easily take me, an advanced SWE an hour to learn the process from scratch or re-learn after not thinking about the system for 18 months. $120/year pays for itself very quickly.

For anyone doing this as a hobby sure, but if this is your business then it’s nuts not to just pay the cheap toll.

But once you set it up - you've set it up for everyone on your team - you just add subdomains and keys to each person - which can be done by a script (depends on your DNS might require 1 manual step but you need this with ngrok anyway).

So it's not 120$/year - it's 120$/year/developer.

And setting it up for yourself - I've found multiple instances where having a configurable nginx reverse proxy on a public server saved me a bunch of time, it's much more flexible than ngrok.

What about something going wrong on ngrok's end and your hands being tied while nothing is working? Some might prefer similar solutions on servers that they control themselves.

Nginx or Caddy aren't all that hard to set up, for example: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-use-nginx-to-proxy-...

Actually with WireGuard, OpenVPN and the like, you can do some pretty interesting (and sometimes problematic) things as well, so there's definitely a lot of flexibility with a few footguns here and there: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you...

Disclaimer: everyone's setup has their own requirements and whatnot. If using external services works for you, that's great! Also, that second article of mine may serve as an example of that NOT to do (you typically would only want to selectively forward ports, rather than forwarding all of the traffic like i did).

> it’s nuts not to just pay the cheap toll

If I have 100 devs that's $12,000/year (ignoring any bulk discount), right? Are you saying that in a company with 100 developers they cannot spare enough time to run their own server cheaper than that?

Additionally, while the amount is 'cheap' in the isolated sense, when you start adding all those 'cheap' services together they quickly add up and suddenly your per-dev costs start getting out of control. In all cases you should consider the value of the service being provided. While I love ngrok, the functionality can easily be replaced for most use cases and move you from a per-dev cost to a relatively (yeah, large numbers of users will cause server scaling/cost changes) fixed cost instead.

Edit: Just to add on, $10/month is more than I pay for Gsuite or Jira on a per dev basis. The Ngrok pricing is drastically off base IMHO.

I've set this up for myself 4 years ago and it just works, having a nginx instance online was really useful many times, eg. just recently I had to setup custom routing rules for services configured on AWS load balancer, just setup the same routing rules on my nginx and tunneled my local services - spent 10 minutes to get a working environment for debugging on local machine - with ngrok I would need to setup a local reverse proxy and tunnel that, small time saver but there have been a lot of instances like this, where I'm like - oh let me just throw this on my garbage server to transfer, let's host it there for a demo, let me install code server there for a workshop, etc. It was there, running on my domain, I know how it's setup - much better value proposition than ngrok for the same price.

I also set it up for a team I worked with - took me 2 hours to get it running again and then the rest of the day to document and add keys for people and explain how and why they should use it. This was a team of 9 people - so in one day I did 1080$ - cost of small instance - for the year. That's above my daily rate so worth it for the owner as well.

10$/dev/month is not a lot - but this is such a trivial service that you setup once and forget, also there's a lot of friction in getting things like this approved and pretty much everyone has a some discretionary cloud provider budget.

> For a business, paying $10/dev/month for ngrok is a rounding error

Yes, but every tool on the wild wants you to pay 10 bucks per user per month. github/gitlab, jira, random CI/CD tool, gitpod, private repo, tailscale/zerotrust, dockerhub, 1password, okta, notion...

Depending on your size, those costs can add up pretty quickly.

ngrok is a very low hanging fruit for keeping expenses at bay, 10 bucks per user is ridiculously expensive for the service they are providing.

For developers, I largely agree with you, though even in that demographic often it's nice to not have to fiddle with the details yourself, even if you know how.

But I'm interested in a different demographic. Someone who wants to run their own blog, or run a Nextcloud server for their family, or host albums from their photography work shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS certs, IP addresses, ports, etc. They should be able to install an app on their laptop (or old Android phone, or Raspberry Pi), go through a quick OAuth flow to tunnel out of their home network, and have their content available to the rest of the web.

Obviously there are UX and security concerns, but these are solvable problems.

> , and have their content available to the rest of the web.

The issue is that DNS and registrar services are fragmented by design, and there doesn't seem to be a standard DNS API that would make it easy to simply say"select your domain registrar" and use that to start an oauth flow then manage DNS records for a site. Therefore, anyone who does run even a simple service like hosted wordpress (without using the host as their registrar) needs to at least have basic knowledge of what DNS records are and how to put in their registrar without messing up email records or other subdomains they might have.

There's the DomainConnect protocol[0] which has been around for a few years. I didn't find it particularly well matched for open source projects, so I've also done some work on my own protocol[1]. The current draft is implemented by TakingNames.io (as a provider) and boringproxy (as a client). You can read more about it and watch a demo here[2].

That said, I think DNS might not be the right layer of abstraction to simplify this. I think we need an open tunneling protocol[3].

[0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/

[1]: https://github.com/takingnames/namedrop-protocol-spec

[2]: https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io

[3]: https://forum.indiebits.io/t/toward-an-open-tunneling-protoc...

Do you ever run into performance issues with the shared machines at the low end? I've found the shared CPUs can be a little iffy under load but if you're basically running reverse proxying only it must not be an issue

Also do you think you'd pay $40/year? that's less than what you're paying Hetzner for no management.

I've been running stuff like code server [1] for some workshop I held recently and I was building simple .NET projects there without any issues.

I wouldn't pay $40/year because the value of having a random instance up with domain/ssl and nginx running all the time has been handy many times so far - worth way more than what I pay for the machine. At this point ngrok would be a downgrade for my use case, but if it was something like 20$/year when I was looking into it I probably wouldn't have bothered setting it up.

[1] https://github.com/coder/code-server

Servers require maintenance. Time is money

Setup https://github.com/antoniomika/sish and get away from manually setting anything up. Uses SSH, supports HTTP(S)/TCP/Websockets/TLS via SNI and let’s users choose their own tunnel names. Can run it on a free instance from google or oracle.

This simplifies:

https://boringproxy.io/

Written by the same guy that wrote awesome-proxy list in the original post.

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