Economics of Boring Proxy and tunnel alternatives for teams
Ngrok Hobbyist plans cost $8 per month but lack UDP support, forcing teams to consider alternatives like Cloudflare Tunnel or Localtonet. This analysis compares protocol support and pricing models for various secure tunnel reverse proxies including Rathole and Pinggy.
Protocol limitations and subscription costs
Ngrok Hobbyist plans cost $8 per month for 5 GB of data transfer, but they do not include a custom domain, and this requires developers to use the $20 Pay-as-you-go tier to access bring-your-own domain features. This tier does not include a custom domain. Developers must pay for the $20 per month Pay-as-you-go plan to access bring-your-own domain features. That plan includes a $20 base fee and charges $0.01 per active hour per certificate. It also bills data transfer beyond the included 5 GB at $0.10 per GB. Ngrok’s Pay-as-you-go tier requires a $20 monthly base fee. This fee bundles $20 of usage credit for data transfer, endpoints, and connections. Unused credit does not roll over. The Ngrok free tier includes 1 GB of data transfer and 20,000 HTTP requests. It also provides 5,000 TCP connections per month on up to 3 online endpoints. Ngrok’s free tier has subpar networking in many parts of the world.
Cloudflare Tunnel remains a free option for all plans. Cloudflare Zero Trust pricing uses a per-seat model. Self-serve users pay $7 per month. The bundle for Zero Trust with browser isolation and CASB costs between $10 and $25 per user per month. Cloudflare Business plans cost $250 per month per zone for new customers. Cloudflare Workers costs $5 per month for 10 million requests. Beyond that limit, requests cost $0.30 per million. Cloudflare R2 storage costs $0.015 per GB per month. Cloudflare Stream charges approximately $5 per 1,000 minutes stored and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered.
Usage-based alternatives and Boring Proxy
Ngrok does not support UDP on any tier. This limitation rules out Ngrok for game servers or VoIP media. Localtonet provides a multi-protocol alternative for approximately $2 per tunnel per month. This price includes custom domains and unlimited bandwidth for the active tunnel. If you are managing a small team, you might find that the fixed monthly costs of Ngrok exceed the usage-based model of Localtonet. Localtonet provides HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, TLS, UDP, and SOCKS5 proxy tunnels. It also includes file server tunnels and IP whitelisting. Localtonet can also turn an Android phone into a proxy exit node via its app. This capability uses airplane mode to rotate IPs.
Boring Proxy provides automatic HTTPS for services that do not provide it. The software redirects all requests on port 80 to port 443. It lacks the wildcard support needed for CapRover installations. Pinggy offers TCP and UDP support for $2.50 per month. Pinggy works through a simple SSH command. It allows developers to share their localhost in seconds. It also generates QR codes for mobile testing. Pinggy is a good choice for fast demos and webhook testing. Zrok is an open-source alternative built on zero-trust principles. Zrok is part of the OpenZiti project. Rathole is a self-hosted reverse proxy written in Rust. It uses the Noise Protocol to provide high security. Tailscale uses the WireGuard protocol to create a private mesh network. Tailscale costs $5 per user for teams. LocalXpose costs $6 per month and provides a GUI for managing tunnels. Localtunnel is a free, community-driven tool for JavaScript-based projects. Frp is a free open-source tool for DevOps teams managing complex network tunnels. Frp allows for granular access control and load balancing.
| Tool | Protocol Support | Best Use Case | Pricing Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ngrok | HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, TLS | Advanced security/traffic analysis | Subscription and usage |
| Cloudflare Tunnel | HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP | High-traffic applications | Per-user (Zero Trust) |
| Localtonet | HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, SOCKS5 | Webhooks and demos | Per-tunnel usage |
| Pinggy | TCP, UDP | Fast demos and webhook testing | Monthly subscription |
| Rathole | TCP, UDP | High-throughput services | Free (Open Source) |
Hardware requirements and capacity
Cloudflare Tunnel throughput depends on the number of ports configured in the system software. A recommended baseline for a cloudflared server includes 4 CPU cores and 4GB of RAM. Administrators should allocate 50,000 ports to the cloudflared process to handle approximately 8,000 users. Every machine is hardware-limited to a maximum of 65,535 ports. This limit is a constraint for users running many services on a single host. TCP requests use and release ports almost instantaneously. UDP traffic is more unique. Non-DNS UDP traffic holds each port for the duration of the connection. To overload a cloudflared instance with 50,000 available ports, a user must generate 50,000 non-DNS UDP requests over a shorter time than the connection reset rate. Cloudflare recommends splitting private DNS traffic into its own tunnel to optimize service availability. DNS queries use more system resources compared to TCP or non-DNS UDP requests. On Linux, administrators should set the open files ulimit to at least 70,000. How do teams reconcile these divergent pricing models when scaling for high-volume UDP traffic?
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