Hey Product Hunt! 🚀 Huge thanks to the community for hunting Rustunnel today. I want to share a quick story about why I built this. A few months ago, I was reviewing my monthly developer tool subscriptions and realized I was paying a flat fee for a tunneling service I only used a few times a week. When my laptop was closed, or I was taking a weekend off, I was still paying. The Problem I’m trying to solve: The underlying tech of existing tools (like Ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnel) is great, but the business model is broken for independent devs and small teams. We are hit with subscription fatigue, arbitrary pricing tiers, paywalls on basic features, and the discomfort of routing traffic through closed-source black boxes. How my approach solved this: I decided to build an open-source alternative from the ground up in Rust. Using Rust gave me the async performance and memory safety needed to handle network traffic reliably. But the biggest shift was in how I approached the architecture of the billing itself. Instead of bolting a standard subscription onto the app, I built a granular, usage-based billing system from scratch. The process involved engineering the backend to accurately track active tunnel time and data transfer down to the minute/byte, and then passing those exact savings directly to the user. The result is a tunnel that is transparent by default (open-source), incredibly fast (Rust), and fair (you literally pay $0 when your laptop is asleep). If you want to read the full teardown of why I chose this pricing model over the industry standard, I wrote a detailed post about it here: https://www.rustunnel.com/blog/p... I’d love to hear your feedback. What’s your biggest pain point with your current tunneling setup?

rustunnel - The open-source tunnel that scales with you

Replies