5 ms·

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 ngr

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.

chrischen 5y ago
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.
- sky_rw 5y ago
  You should start thinking of your own time this way. Everyone has an hourly rate, how much do you spend solving problems like this?
  - chrischen 5y ago
    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.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
I also think one should razor sharp focus on delivering customer value to be successful instead of introducing new tech you need to manage.
razemio 5y ago
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.
- sky_rw 5y ago
  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. $120/year pays for itself very quickly. For anyone doing this as a hobby sure, but if this is your business then it’s nuts not to just pay the cheap toll.
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    But once you set it up - you've set it up for everyone on your team - you just add subdomains and keys to each person - which can be done by a script (depends on your DNS might require 1 manual step but you need this with ngrok anyway). So it's not 120$/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.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    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-your-front-end-and-back-end 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-your-homelab-behind-nat 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).
moonchrome 5y ago
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.
pid-1 5y ago
> 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.

chrischen 5y ago

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.

sky_rw 5y ago
You should start thinking of your own time this way. Everyone has an hourly rate, how much do you spend solving problems like this?
- chrischen 5y ago
  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.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

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

razemio 5y ago

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.

sky_rw 5y ago
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. $120/year pays for itself very quickly. For anyone doing this as a hobby sure, but if this is your business then it’s nuts not to just pay the cheap toll.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  But once you set it up - you've set it up for everyone on your team - you just add subdomains and keys to each person - which can be done by a script (depends on your DNS might require 1 manual step but you need this with ngrok anyway). So it's not 120$/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.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  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-your-front-end-and-back-end 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-your-homelab-behind-nat 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).

moonchrome 5y ago

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.

pid-1 5y ago

> 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.