I Got Frustrated with ngrok and Built My Own Self-Hosted Tunneling Tool

I Got Frustrated with ngrok and Built My Own Self-Hosted Tunneling Tool I've been running side projects and local dev environments for years. Every time I needed to expose a local service — test a webhook, share a WIP with a teammate, demo something to a client — I'd reach for ngrok. And every time, I'd hit the same walls. The free tier gives you 1GB of bandwidth, one active tunnel, and a random subdomain that changes every session. Want a stable URL? That's $10/month. Want more than one tunnel? Pay more. Want to use your own domain? Enterprise tier. For something that's essentially forwarding TCP packets to my machine, it felt like I was renting someone else's infrastructure for a problem I could solve myself. So I looked at alternatives. The Alternatives Weren't Great Either frp has over 100k GitHub stars, so I tried it first. Technically solid, but the TOML configuration is genuinely painful. I spent more time debugging my config file than actually tunneling. It works — but it doesn