{"slug": "ngrok", "name": "ngrok", "category": "networking", "category_name": "Networking and VPN", "description": "", "recommenders": 1, "commenters": 8, "warners": 3, "score": -0.596, "rising": 1.0, "first": "2025-12-04", "latest": "2026-09-22", "why": "exactly what ngrok already does since forever with a pretty high free quota", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 4, "compare": 0, "warn": 3}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0], "listed": false, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "exactly what ngrok already does since forever with a pretty high free quota", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["ngrok"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 796136128, "item_id": 49758508, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758508", "by": "_user_account", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exactly what ngrok already does since forever with a pretty high free quota", "excerpt": "The main use case: cloud harnesses to access your local network; I highly recommend to run the harness in your local network instead, then you own the session, no tunnel needed. The other use case for webhooks is ok, but is exactly what ngrok already does since forever with a pretty high free quota.", "context": "", "use_case": "webhooks tunneling", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 796849521, "item_id": 49803095, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803095", "by": "whydoineedthis", "date": "2026-09-22", "stance": "warn", "quote": "you will often find the ngrok/cloudflare tunnels too slow to load the local host assets", "excerpt": "If you want to host your own version of this in AWS, automated with terraform, you can use https://github.com/nelsonenzo/tolocal It uses basic auth at the edge to protect the endpoint being used by anyone. The technical advantage to self hosting is bandwidth throughput. For instance, If your using a css framework that is bulky on dev, but then minimized for prod, you will often find the ngrok/cloudflare tunnels too s", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}, {"id": 762841985, "item_id": 47677624, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677624", "by": "Sayuj01", "date": "2026-04-07", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Every time I used ngrok for quickly sharing my localhost site, I just prayed no bots finds it", "excerpt": "Every time I used ngrok for quickly sharing my localhost site, I just prayed no bots finds it and start extracting. I found a way to share localhost in a more controlled way where instead I have a invite only mechanism where I will manually approve or block the IP(s) that makes a request. That's what Smuggl does, so you can smuggl your localhost to specific people rather than carrying it over the open world.", "context": "", "use_case": "sharing localhost", "switched_from": "", "story": "Smuggl \u2013 Share your localhost as an invite only link"}, {"id": 746926385, "item_id": 46682899, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682899", "by": "Trufa", "date": "2026-01-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I was trying ngrok, localtunnel, and a couple more, they all were pretty slow", "excerpt": "Nice, just today, I was trying ngrok, localtunnel, and a couple more, they all were pretty slow, fair enough for the free tier, but I'm interested in knowing is there something architecturally hard or expensive with having fast traffic? I love this and will definitely try it. I would honestly love to have it with a dockerized version with something like caddy that manages ssl so I can basically just run a docker comm", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling local servers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Pipenet \u2013 A Modern Alternative to Localtunnel"}]}], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["tunneling", "webhooks tunneling", "testing and demos", "sharing localhost", "tunneling local servers", "serving localhost publicly"], "compared": [{"slug": "cloudflare-quick-tunnels", "name": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 2}, {"slug": "tailscale-funnel", "name": "Tailscale Funnel", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "tailscale", "name": "Tailscale", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754785", "title": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677623", "title": "Smuggl \u2013 Share your localhost as an invite only link", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680597", "title": "Show HN: Pipenet \u2013 A Modern Alternative to Localtunnel", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46145902", "title": "Tunnl.gg", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {"warn": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"warn": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 3, "recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 796849521, "item_id": 49803095, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803095", "by": "whydoineedthis", "date": "2026-09-22", "stance": "warn", "quote": "you will often find the ngrok/cloudflare tunnels too slow to load the local host assets", "excerpt": "If you want to host your own version of this in AWS, automated with terraform, you can use https://github.com/nelsonenzo/tolocal It uses basic auth at the edge to protect the endpoint being used by anyone. The technical advantage to self hosting is bandwidth throughput. For instance, If your using a css framework that is bulky on dev, but then minimized for prod, you will often find the ngrok/cloudflare tunnels too s", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}, {"id": 796136128, "item_id": 49758508, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758508", "by": "_user_account", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exactly what ngrok already does since forever with a pretty high free quota", "excerpt": "The main use case: cloud harnesses to access your local network; I highly recommend to run the harness in your local network instead, then you own the session, no tunnel needed. The other use case for webhooks is ok, but is exactly what ngrok already does since forever with a pretty high free quota.", "context": "", "use_case": "webhooks tunneling", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}, {"id": 796116353, "item_id": 49757272, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757272", "by": "rinconrex", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Ngrok is fine", "excerpt": "Oh I use this for testing and demos between my phone and computer. Ngrok is fine, probably better off using Tailscale, but it's very easy to just run a quick tunnel with \"cloudflared tunnel --url localhost:XXXX\".", "context": "", "use_case": "testing and demos", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}, {"id": 796109281, "item_id": 49756830, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49756830", "by": "nullbyte", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used to use a service called ngrok for this", "excerpt": "Love this, very cool. I used to use a service called ngrok for this, but it's nice that Cloudflare is offering one now.", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}, {"id": 796100802, "item_id": 49756300, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49756300", "by": "israrkhan", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have played around with frp, bore and ngrok.", "excerpt": "For someone looking for an opensource solutions, following is an awesome resource for tunnelling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling I have played around with frp, bore and ngrok.", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"}, {"id": 762841985, "item_id": 47677624, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677624", "by": "Sayuj01", "date": "2026-04-07", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Every time I used ngrok for quickly sharing my localhost site, I just prayed no bots finds it", "excerpt": "Every time I used ngrok for quickly sharing my localhost site, I just prayed no bots finds it and start extracting. I found a way to share localhost in a more controlled way where instead I have a invite only mechanism where I will manually approve or block the IP(s) that makes a request. That's what Smuggl does, so you can smuggl your localhost to specific people rather than carrying it over the open world.", "context": "", "use_case": "sharing localhost", "switched_from": "", "story": "Smuggl \u2013 Share your localhost as an invite only link"}, {"id": 746926385, "item_id": 46682899, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682899", "by": "Trufa", "date": "2026-01-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I was trying ngrok, localtunnel, and a couple more, they all were pretty slow", "excerpt": "Nice, just today, I was trying ngrok, localtunnel, and a couple more, they all were pretty slow, fair enough for the free tier, but I'm interested in knowing is there something architecturally hard or expensive with having fast traffic? I love this and will definitely try it. I would honestly love to have it with a dockerized version with something like caddy that manages ssl so I can basically just run a docker comm", "context": "", "use_case": "tunneling local servers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Pipenet \u2013 A Modern Alternative to Localtunnel"}, {"id": 738347137, "item_id": 46146696, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146696", "by": "madethemcry", "date": "2025-12-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used ngrok when it was the to-go answer for serving localhost", "excerpt": "I used ngrok when it was the to-go answer for serving localhost (temporarily, not permanent) to the public, but the last time I searched for alternatives I stumbled upon the following jewel. > tailscale funnel 3000 Available on the internet: https://some-device-name.tail12345.ts.net/ |-- proxy http://127.0.0.1:3000 Press Ctrl+C to exit. I've tailscale installed on my machine anyway for some connected devices. But eve", "context": "", "use_case": "serving localhost publicly", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tunnl.gg"}]}