I run Packetriot: https://packetriot.com, which is an alternative to ngrok. It's been in operation for 6-ish years and reached $500/month in year two. It doesn't replace my salary (yet) but that's what I'm working toward. Thankful to have thousands of users and some big companies using our services or self-hosting our server.
This is a fun space to work in but there's lot of small competitors and opensource alternatives. In the first few years it was sometimes demotivating, but at some point I began seeing competitors bow out and Packetriot kept getting better and better each year.
This year I published a lot of updates across the platform. Our UX is better with a new web-based UI for our client and all of the features of the platform can be managed in the client UI. No more going back forth between the client and user portal.
I'm planning on releasing a community edition of our server in 2026 so that anyone can use our network server for free, for personal use or to evaluate for commercial use.
Thanks for sharing this. I run packetriot.com, another tunneling service and I ended up writing my own scanner for endpoints using keyword lists I gathered from various infosec resources.
I had done some account filtering for origins coming out of Tor, VPN networks, data centers, etc. but I recently dropped those and added an portal page for free accounts, similar to what ngrok does.
It was very effective at preventing abuse. I also added mechanism for reporting abuse on the safety page that's presented.
Our services were used for C2 as well. I investigated it a bit but eventually decided to just drop TCP forwarding from our free-tier and that reduced our abuse/malware reports for C2 over TCP to zero essentially.
One path I looked at was to use the VirusTotal API to help identify C2's that other security organizations were identifying and leverage that to automatically take down malicious TCP endpoints. I wrote some POCs but did not deploy them. It's something I plan on taking up again at some point next year.
Want to chat on discord? Maybe we could combine efforts to try and stop people abusing our services :). We have a few vendors sending us automated reports, maybe I could open it up for multiple projects.
Building these types of tunneling systems are great projects. You learn a lot and can master skills in many different areas.
Packetriot has been operating for five years and the first few years was all spent on performance and stability of the core networking services. As the software and network matured, I spent more time on the operations and maintenance, and automating as much of that as possible.
Recently I've begun building tools to detect phishing and potential malicious behaviors. This is a common problem that operators of these tunnel networks have to deal with. It's an interesting and fun technical area and helps make the Internet a safer place :)
Similar to ngrok with our own differences and approach. I also publish another product called Spokes Gateway which builds on the tunneling server and includes support for service meshes, high-availability, clusters and some other features.
I'm building a separate website for Spokes and its related software, hoping to publish it soon. It's eventual home will be https://spokes.network.
I use ProtonMail and overall it works pretty good and the value is great. The product is focused on security first so I think user experience suffers a bit. It's works fine but if you previously used a mail client like Spark on your phone you'll definitely miss it.
The mobile app is okay, it's good enough for reading and sending short replies. The web interface is alright. I like to use the bridge application from ProtonMail on my desktop and use a mail client like Thunderbird or Apple Mail.
I like protonmail and consider it mostly a suitable replacement to gmail. I say mostly because some websites don't accept emails with the protonmail domain. Weird huh. My understanding is that protonmail might of been used by some bad actors and it's been labelled as the bad people email.
It's great to have options and alternatives. I feel like calling your application a copy-cat is being harsh. What you've discovered is that there is a now a market of providers for the category of your application.
If there was only one instance of any sort of application or tool the world would be boring and we'd be stuck with only stale options.
A lot of people have seen the Clint Eastwood "Man with no name" westerns but if you haven't watched "Once Upon a Time in the West" I would definitely check it out. One of the best movies I've seen and if you're not fan of westerns (which I wasn't) you will appreciate the genre some more after seeing this movie.
I wrote a tunneling service called Packetriot that is similar. It's probably slightly older than inlets. However, it's not an opensource project. The tunnels are assigned static hostnames and the servers you connect to are static as well, so setting up CNAME and A records for custom sites are simple. You can host any number of websites or services behind a single tunnel.
Let's Encrypt is built-in and can manage all of your certs automatically. The client can serve static assets and upstream to app servers, so you can eliminate the need for an extra web server running in your environment.
There are packages for Deb, RPM, containers, mac and windows, and for almost all architectures (x86/amd64/arm32/arm64).
I designed the service for 24/7 operation so uptimes for tunnels are weeks at a time. They auto-reconnect if there's a connection drop. You can find it here: https://packetriot.com
It's built exactly for that. The tunnel is established in reverse over a websocket, so outgoing traffic from your PC is TCP:443 which looks like normal TLS traffic.
I've been using this for almost 6 months and haven't seen any throttling. Your Netflix, YouTube or any other streaming traffic will dwarf what bandwidth you consume, unless we're talking terabytes...
This is a fun space to work in but there's lot of small competitors and opensource alternatives. In the first few years it was sometimes demotivating, but at some point I began seeing competitors bow out and Packetriot kept getting better and better each year.
This year I published a lot of updates across the platform. Our UX is better with a new web-based UI for our client and all of the features of the platform can be managed in the client UI. No more going back forth between the client and user portal.
I'm planning on releasing a community edition of our server in 2026 so that anyone can use our network server for free, for personal use or to evaluate for commercial use.
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