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Comment by razemio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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).

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