# ngrok 19 Hacker News commenters recommended ngrok and 14 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. **Verdict:** People recommend it for quickly exposing a local port with little setup; the most common caveat is a restrictive free tier. ## Why people recommend it - Quick, simple way to expose ports (4 comments): "If I wanted to share something internal with a friend I would use ngrok or any of the million alternatives." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544493)) "exposing it with a Cloudflare Tunnel or Ngrok is probably the path of least resistance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301274)) "you could probably use ngrok and setup a remote on your laptop in a pinch" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947801)) - Works well in practice (2 comments): "Something Ngrok is doing is working" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266084)) "ngrok is working well for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427371)) - Built-in tunnel protections and warning page (2 comments): "An interstitial warning page is probably the happy medium, and what ngrok already uses now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49190168)) "allows you to actually put protections in place for your tunnel" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400159)) ## What people warn about - Free tier restrictive or unreliable (3 comments): "hasn't found a way to finance itself without removing the pure free tunneling option" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758227)) "the free tier of ngrok (broken SSH tunnel)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960870)) "ngrok's free tier got too restrictive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088420)) - Slow latency and assets loading (3 comments): "you will often find the ngrok/cloudflare tunnels too slow to load the local host assets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803095)) "they all were pretty slow, fair enough for the free tier" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682899)) "frustrated with ngrok's latency and session limits" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47297606)) - Custom domains cost money (2 comments): "great tool, but custom domains cost money" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45837508)) "Way better than Ngrok and you can set it up on a custom subdomain you own." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762818)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Cloudflare Quick Tunnels](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-quick-tunnels.md): 29 recommend - [Tunnl.gg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tunnl-gg.md): 12 recommend - [BitBang](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bitbang.md): 10 recommend - [Pinggy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pinggy.md): 6 recommend - [sish](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sish.md): 6 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://ngrok.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "ngrok", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ngrok/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).