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For tunnels that are meant to stay up

Looking for an ngrok Alternative That Does Not Reset Your URL?

ngrok is built around development sessions. Pluggie is built for the service on hardware you own that has to stay reachable — one stable HTTPS hostname, your own domain included, and a flat monthly price that does not count the hours you were online.

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Free forever tier · No email or credit card required

What sends people looking

  • The URL changes when the agent restarts, so every bookmark breaks
  • A custom domain sits behind a higher plan and an extra charge
  • Billing is metered, and a service that runs 24/7 is always active
  • The free tier is sized for testing, not for something you keep running
  • You wanted one permanent address, not a session

What Pluggie does instead

  • One hostname, assigned once and kept
  • Your own domain on the paid plan — a single CNAME, registrar unchanged
  • A flat price per month, whatever the uptime
  • A free tier with no email address and no card
  • Built for a NAS, a home server or anything that stays on
Side by side

Where the two actually differ

Both are hosted tunnels and both work without touching your router. The differences show up after the first five minutes.

🔗

An address that stays put

Your hostname is assigned once and kept. A restart, a reboot or a new public IP does not change it, so bookmarks and integrations keep working.

🌐

Your own domain, included

Point a CNAME and keep your registrar and nameservers where they are. Included on paid plans from $6/month rather than billed as an extra.

💵

Flat price, not per active hour

The same monthly amount whether the tunnel was up for an hour or the whole month. Metered billing is designed for tunnels that come and go; this is not that.

📱

Nothing to install at the far end

Open a normal HTTPS link in any browser — a work laptop, a borrowed phone, a machine where you have no administrator rights.

Honestly

When ngrok is the better choice

We would rather you picked the right tool than churned in a month.

Stay with ngrok if…

  • You are testing webhooks against localhost while you code
  • You want official SDKs and agent libraries in many languages
  • You need ephemeral, per-session tunnels you spin up and throw away
  • You rely on their edge, traffic policy or enterprise controls

Pluggie fits if…

  • The service runs on hardware you own and stays on
  • You want the same address in six months
  • You want your own domain without a metered surcharge
  • You are behind CGNAT and port forwarding is not an option

Want the wider view? The five-way comparison puts Pluggie next to ngrok, Nabu Casa, Cloudflare Tunnel and Tailscale. ngrok plan details change — check ngrok.com for their current terms.

Setup

Three steps, about five minutes

1

Run the agent

A single Docker container on the machine your service already runs on. Home Assistant users can install it as an add-on instead of a container.

2

Point a tunnel at it

Give the tunnel the local address — for example http://192.168.1.10:8096. Add one tunnel per service.

3

Open the address

The service is live on its own HTTPS URL with a valid certificate — and it is still the same URL after a reboot.

Questions

Common questions about switching from ngrok

It depends what you are running. ngrok is built around development sessions — you start an agent, you get an endpoint, you stop it when you are done. Pluggie is built for the opposite case: a service on hardware you own that should stay reachable for months at the same address. If your tunnel is meant to be permanent, that difference matters more than any feature list.
Yes. Your hostname is assigned once and stays yours. Restarting the agent, rebooting the machine or changing your public IP does not change the URL, so you can bookmark it, put it in an app, or hand it to someone else.
Yes, and it is part of the paid plan rather than priced separately. You point a CNAME at Pluggie and keep your registrar and nameservers exactly where they are — there is no DNS transfer.
There is a free tier with one tunnel and 1 GB at full speed per 30 days, and it needs no email address and no card. After the cap it throttles rather than cutting you off. Paid plans start at £5/month and add custom domains and more bandwidth.
No. You open a normal HTTPS link in any browser — a work laptop, a borrowed phone, a machine where you have no administrator rights. Only the machine hosting your service runs the agent.
No. It is a flat monthly price in your currency and it does not change with how many hours your tunnel was online. For a service that runs continuously that is the whole point.
Yes. The agent dials outward, so nothing needs to be forwarded on your router and no public IPv4 address is required. That is also why it works on connections where port forwarding is not possible at all.
If you are testing webhooks against localhost, want official SDKs and agent libraries across many languages, need ephemeral per-session tunnels, or depend on their edge and enterprise features, ngrok is the better tool and we would rather you used it. Pluggie is narrower on purpose.

Try it on one service first

Free tier, no email, no card. Five minutes to find out whether a permanent address is what you actually wanted.

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