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Longtime ngrok customer. It seems like ngrok went from kind of a humble presentation to a more splashy look and maybe larger feature set. The company is also

Longtime ngrok customer. It seems like ngrok went from kind of a humble presentation to a more splashy look and maybe larger feature set. The company is also actively recruiting sr swe’s right now. Was the product bought or did the company take capital relatively recently? It was such an understated thing for so long.

anderspitman 5y ago
Personally I think they might be feeling the heat from Cloudflare Tunnel. To quote myself from a couple weeks ago[0] (note that an ngrok employee responded to some of my concerns): > As much as it pains me to say it, Cloudflare seems well positioned to eat ngrok's lunch. AFAIK they offer everything ngrok does plus auto TLS certs, CDN, domain name registration, and tons of other features. They also have way more edge servers for terminating tunnels close to the origin devices. And they can afford to do all this for free as a loss leader product. It's the AWS bundling effect. Oh and the client source code is available. > I don't want to see Cloudflare completely take over this space, but Cloudflare Tunnel is tough to compete with. > One knob ngrok could still turn is adding auto TLS certs which are managed on the client side. Then you can offer e2ee which is something Cloudflare will probably never do. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260530
- samhw 5y ago
  I'm amazed even to hear the words "an Ngrok employee", like it were Google or something. The last time I remember reading about Ngrok, it was just one guy's repo on GitHub. That doesn't even feel that long ago. I'm stunned and perplexed to hear all of this.
  - evanelias 5y ago
    Ngrok is a high-quality, well-engineered, bootstrapped product. Honest question, why be stunned and perplexed that it is successful enough to build a company around? Plenty of software companies start this way. And there's a huge spectrum between "having employees" and "being Google".
wenholz 5y ago
Greetings! Director of Eng here at ngrok. Figured I should say something (more of a lurker than I care to admit) since someone mentioned the recruiting side of things ;) We haven't been bought and haven't taken any capital, but we have made some massive investments into our product: new ways of connecting, new ways of securing, reliability, etc. There are a couple announcements coming soon I don't want to spoil. We've been a quiet crew for a while! On the recruiting side, we've got tons of openings in product engineering (junior, senior, management, PMs) and across the rest of the company. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have an interest in working with us.

anderspitman 5y ago

Personally I think they might be feeling the heat from Cloudflare Tunnel. To quote myself from a couple weeks ago[0] (note that an ngrok employee responded to some of my concerns): > As much as it pains me to say it, Cloudflare seems well positioned to eat ngrok's lunch. AFAIK they offer everything ngrok does plus auto TLS certs, CDN, domain name registration, and tons of other features. They also have way more edge servers for terminating tunnels close to the origin devices. And they can afford to do all this for free as a loss leader product. It's the AWS bundling effect. Oh and the client source code is available. > I don't want to see Cloudflare completely take over this space, but Cloudflare Tunnel is tough to compete with. > One knob ngrok could still turn is adding auto TLS certs which are managed on the client side. Then you can offer e2ee which is something Cloudflare will probably never do. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260530

samhw 5y ago
I'm amazed even to hear the words "an Ngrok employee", like it were Google or something. The last time I remember reading about Ngrok, it was just one guy's repo on GitHub. That doesn't even feel that long ago. I'm stunned and perplexed to hear all of this.
- evanelias 5y ago
  Ngrok is a high-quality, well-engineered, bootstrapped product. Honest question, why be stunned and perplexed that it is successful enough to build a company around? Plenty of software companies start this way. And there's a huge spectrum between "having employees" and "being Google".

wenholz 5y ago

Greetings! Director of Eng here at ngrok. Figured I should say something (more of a lurker than I care to admit) since someone mentioned the recruiting side of things ;) We haven't been bought and haven't taken any capital, but we have made some massive investments into our product: new ways of connecting, new ways of securing, reliability, etc. There are a couple announcements coming soon I don't want to spoil. We've been a quiet crew for a while! On the recruiting side, we've got tons of openings in product engineering (junior, senior, management, PMs) and across the rest of the company. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have an interest in working with us.