Completely agree with the reasons. Most all of my indie company's software is free and OSS - so no opportunity to capture any value.
I created the open source tunnel project called inlets which now has 8k GitHub stars, the same thing happened - lots of people used it, got value and didn't pay a sponsorship or for support.
So seeing the problem, I then went on to create a paid version which adds value and features for companies. The main issue was that many developers anchored the pricing to ngrok, but ngrok is not the same product, for one, it's a SaaS with rate-limits and is a cloud service.
inlets PRO doesn't have any rate-limiting, can act as a VPN, integrates natively with Docekr + Kubernetes and can be self-hosted too. That's the value of it. So when asked, I advise Ngrok customers to stay with what they know, they aren't the target market.
> The main issue was that many developers anchored the pricing to ngrok, but ngrok is not the same product, for one, it's a SaaS with rate-limits and is a cloud service.
You’re hooking me in to an interesting pitch here.
> doesn't have any rate-limiting, can act as a VPN, integrates natively with Docekr + Kubernetes and can be self-hosted too. That's the value of it.
That’s just some stuff it does though, not the value.
As an underwhelmed ngrok free user, you could probably sell me this product somehow. We have lots of pain around webhooks in CI, especially with parallel builds.
I've used ngrok for dealing with API webhooks before all well. Is there some automatic way you guys make it work? I use ngrok free and have to type in the specific up each time.
I created the open source tunnel project called inlets which now has 8k GitHub stars, the same thing happened - lots of people used it, got value and didn't pay a sponsorship or for support.
So seeing the problem, I then went on to create a paid version which adds value and features for companies. The main issue was that many developers anchored the pricing to ngrok, but ngrok is not the same product, for one, it's a SaaS with rate-limits and is a cloud service.
inlets PRO doesn't have any rate-limiting, can act as a VPN, integrates natively with Docekr + Kubernetes and can be self-hosted too. That's the value of it. So when asked, I advise Ngrok customers to stay with what they know, they aren't the target market.
It still makes anchoring a challenge though, and Neil Davidson of Redgate talks about this in Don't Roll the Dice - another eBook the author may enjoy reading - https://www.red-gate.com/library/dont-just-roll-the-dice