Is it worth to pay $24 for Ngrok?

Are you not able to host your service on a server?

You could use some cheap cloud servers from DigitalOcean or Hetzner and it would cost you something like $5 to $10 (depending on the resources you need).

You might spend a bit of time initially just to set up everything but technically it woulf be easy to set up.

For password protection, you can probably do some basic http auth.

What is the opportunity cost? How much will cost you replacing ngrok?

I am generally okay to pay for things that provide value, I don’t like when I pay for things I don’t use.

Cloudflare tunnels worked for me. Free too.

I pay for Ngrok as a few of the apps I work on require local SSL for payment testing.

Every time ngrok is mentioned people here say “but you could do it yourself”. I assume this would mean registering a domain and setting up Nginx and letsencrypt and using ssh tunnels to replicate.

For me, I definitely don’t want to have to manage that, as “easy” as it is. If I’m doing some client work and need a local domain, the last thing I need is to spend 20 minutes fixing my home-made tunnel because letsencrypt didn’t renew or something.

So I’m my eyes it’s definitely worth it.

Edit: My bad, I wrote a reply on mobile before fully reading your comment. I had assumed $24/month was some annual deal. I didn't realise they had increased pricing like that. $24 per month is a different story. I'm not sure that's "definitely worth it". Even if you have to spend 20 minutes a month managing a home-rolled Ngrok, it may be worth it for the subset of features I need.

It sounds like they are expanding from their initial "developer tools" offering to "infrastructure tools".

https://ngrok.com/next-generation

Maybe $24/month/user is cheap for these new tools, but it's disappointing for users like me who use Ngrok for what is was built initially to solve.

Edit edit: Looks like existing users will continue to get the previous price:

> If you’re on an existing paid plan your pricing will not change. All existing paying customers have been grandfathered into their existing plans.

Depending on your setup, you could check out https://fly.io. Pretty easy and generous free tier.

> I have no idea why the price increases so much.

They probably realized they either do this or go out of business. My guess is that bandwidth is eating their earnings.

Haha, no.

For businesses that utilize ngrok for commercial purposes, I think it's priced very well. However, for the use-case of a (very) occasional localhost tunnel for webhook testing, I do think it's overpriced @ $25/mo. Perhaps it'd be nice if they added a cheaper paid plan for only localhost tunnels and a static subdomain, without the rest of their services (i.e. what ngrok was when it started).

But then again, I use the free tier for testing webhooks (or for viewing UI changes/fixes on my phone) without much hassle, so perhaps pushing those users to the free tier and all commercial usage onto a paid tier is what ngrok wants?

There is a promising project alternative to ngrok called LocalXpose (https://localxpose.io), which provides most of ngrok features with only $6 per month, they have a great support too.