Pinggy
Get public URLs for apps running on localhost.
We had launched the alpha version of https://pinggy.io by February 2023. We are glad to see thousands of users using Pinggy now. We want to thank anyone who tried Pinggy and gave us a chance.
Here is the list of things we learned about what makes users love Pinggy:
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It works! Any software that works as expected has value. Pinggy used to fail now and then in its early days. Gradually, we have improved the stability, patched all corner cases, and improved from feedback. Now, Pinggy works as expected, which makes users happy. No one likes surprises with the software tools they use for work.
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We provide support. We try our best to help our users whenever they reach out to us via email or Discord. Quick support gives users confidence.
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How easy it is to get started. The core proposition of Pinggy was to make it a one-command tool. No installation required. That makes it dead simple for users to try it out.
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Progress. We slowly but steadily roll our upgrades to Pinggy. Be it for stability, features, security, or support.
We aim to touch 10K MRR by the end of this year.
A user from South Korea 🇰🇷 brought to our attention that Pinggy works great for them, but it is slow. The answer to “why” was obvious to us. Pinggy was hosting its servers in the USA, specifically in Ohio. One key goal of Pinggy is to provide not only tunnels but fast and reliable tunnels.
To improve the situation, we decided to host the tunnels in the region nearest to where the user is creating the tunnel from (as the default behavior).
Today, Pinggy is hosted across three regions: US, Europe, and Asia.
To scale across multiple regions, we did the following:
- Spawn edge nodes in multiple regions.
- Host our own DNS server to dynamically point tunnel traffic to the correct edge.
- Use AWS Route 53 for latency-based routing.
- Implement a central coordinator to handle authentication, sessions, etc.
Find the detailed engineering blog here: https://pinggy.io/blog/scaling_across_multiple_regions/
A blog post related to https://pinggy.io was posted on Hacker News today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35944315
In 12 hours we got more than a thousand visitors to our landing page from the blog. This is how much traffic HN can bring even if the link is one hop away in a separate post!
We got 4 trial subscriptions in this period and many users tried out the free tier.
I just hope this also has some impact on the site ranking.
From January to around April 25 we did not do any publicity. We were busy pumping some essential features such as:
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A web debugger on the go which allows:
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Debug HTTP / HTTPS requests live
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Without download any tool
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Ability to replay requests
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Rich Terminal Interface
- Live request logs
- View request / response headers
- Stats on bandwidth and more
We posted these updates on Reddit and finally got a paying customer! Feels awesome.
We posted on Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34337592
We're still in the alpha stage, but we've already received some encouraging feedback. For example, one user said they had switched from ngrok to Cloudflare Tunnels because of issues with ngrok, but found Cloudflare Tunnels to be difficult to use. They were excited to try Pinggy as it seems to fill the gap. Another user suggested that we make our client open source, which is definitely something we'll consider.
We're also actively working on adding more features, such as the ability to view and replay requests, and we plan to gradually introduce paid tiers as we move towards a more mature offering.
Overall, we're thrilled with the positive response we've received so far and we look forward to continuing to improve Pinggy based on the feedback we receive. Thanks for giving us a try!
We (me and a friend of mine) used tunnelling services to host our side projects such as ngrok or CF tunnels. But there was always one issue - downloading, installing, and configuration took time and effort.
Our use case was simple: get public URLs to a device such as a Raspberry Pi, or our old desktop PC turned into a server, or a new cloud instance where we did not want the headache of pointing a domain.
So the idea was a HTTP / HTTPS tunnelling service that gives public URLs with a single command without downloading anything. This led us to develop https://pinggy.io
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