Really glad to see someone stepping up to fill this void! I've debated doing this myself many times but it's low on my list of priorities.
Please don't interpret these frank questions as criticism or mistrust up front, but we've been burned a few times with tools like this start open source and then realize there might be some money out there and go proprietary, usually with a rug pull. I don't mind offering paid hosting at all (in fact I think it makes sense to offer that) so long as the code all remains open source. The "open core" model may even be ok so long as it's truly just "enterprise" feature that are gated, though that's a hard line to tread.
What are your monetization plans? Are you committed to long-term being actually open source?
Personally, I would suggest licensing this as AGPL to ensure that if anyone does take it and try to stand up a paid/proprietary service based on your work, the license will at least force them to open their code. It's not perfect. but with MIT you have zero defense against that. It would also give people like me some peace of mind.
One of my vendors recently disallowed registering ngrok URLs for testing webhooks. They said they were too unreliable — and the vendor was getting blamed for ngrok failing to deliver requests.
Seems like a real shame that they’ve been abandoning their core product that was reliable for years in pursuit of nebulous AI/enterprise routing products.
I get that dev tunnels are probably not a massive business that’s going to get VCs mouths’ watering, but maybe not every business needs to shoot the moon?
Anyway, glad competitors are coming in to fill the space.
Interesting project. Is the main value to "self-host your own ngrok", or is it to actually compete with ngrok using an open-source project ? If so how do you intend to monetize your project ?
A ngrok-style secure tunnel server written in Rust. Expose local services through a public server over encrypted WebSocket connections with TLS termination, HTTP/TCP proxying, a live dashboard, Prometheus metrics, and audit logging.
Please don't interpret these frank questions as criticism or mistrust up front, but we've been burned a few times with tools like this start open source and then realize there might be some money out there and go proprietary, usually with a rug pull. I don't mind offering paid hosting at all (in fact I think it makes sense to offer that) so long as the code all remains open source. The "open core" model may even be ok so long as it's truly just "enterprise" feature that are gated, though that's a hard line to tread.
What are your monetization plans? Are you committed to long-term being actually open source?
Personally, I would suggest licensing this as AGPL to ensure that if anyone does take it and try to stand up a paid/proprietary service based on your work, the license will at least force them to open their code. It's not perfect. but with MIT you have zero defense against that. It would also give people like me some peace of mind.
Seems like a real shame that they’ve been abandoning their core product that was reliable for years in pursuit of nebulous AI/enterprise routing products.
I get that dev tunnels are probably not a massive business that’s going to get VCs mouths’ watering, but maybe not every business needs to shoot the moon?
Anyway, glad competitors are coming in to fill the space.