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Rustunnel – An open-source tunnel alternative that charges $0 when idle

Rustunnel – An open-source tunnel alternative that charges $0 when idle

by joaoh82·Apr 1, 2026·2 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidSlickSolve My Problem

ngrok alternative charging $0 when idle with Rust performance and self-host.

Strengths
  • •Pay-as-you-go pricing undercuts ngrok's subscription model for sporadic usage.
  • •Written in Rust with minimal memory footprint and negligible latency overhead.
  • •Self-host relay option under AGPL for teams needing full infrastructure control.
Weaknesses
  • •Tunneling space is crowded with ngrok, Cloudflare Tunnel, and LocalXpose.
  • •Managed edge network trust model requires faith in a new, unproven provider.
Target Audience

Developers testing webhooks, sharing local previews, exposing local services

Similar To

ngrok · Cloudflare Tunnel · LocalXpose

Post Description

I posted the initial open-source release here a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been building out a usage-based billing system to fix what I would do differently in the existing tunneling tools.

Details on the pricing model and why I built it this way in the first comment.

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