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Comment by danrl | Hacker News Reader

For everyone trying to find out what the main product is: Portmaster seems to be a local Pihole kind of thing which injects itself into the DNS resolution locally.

The website could be better at explaining that and general discoverability.

Kudos for full IPv6 support.

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I think the DNS resolution is only one feature. The screenshot shows active connections, including duration and the local process path. That's a lot more powerful and interesting than a local PiHole.

I can't tell if it inherits the huge shortcoming of pihole - any app can just use an ip address and go around it.

also, is the SPN thing (their per-app version of VPN) part of the free version?

Nope. Portmaster is a full fledged application firewall. Bypassing is not trivial, if not impossible.

SPN is _not_ part of the free version. If you can pinpoint where you might have gotten this feeling, it would be great if you could tell us - then we can improve!

I meant - does it route everything through an SPN (someone else's server).

The question arising is not necessarily your fault, more like healthy skepticism because other products turn out to be a service and you don't realize they've made themselves a dependency.

If you enable the SPN, everything is routed through the SPN by default and will go over at least two hops. You can change this to your preference. Most things can be configured per-app.

The SPN is the only service-like feature, all other features are 100% local. The only dependency is that updates - including intelligence data - is downloaded from our servers: Traffic is encrypted and binaries are signed "end-to-end", intel data will be signed soon.

No, that's more a software firewall like Little Snitch or GlassWire. It's not a local Pihole kind of thing.

First line of the readme: "Portmaster is a free and open-source application firewall that does the heavy lifting for you."

Thanks for the feedback!

Could you go into a bit more detail what was confusing or what information you felt was missing when looking at the website?

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