Introducing Pay-as-you-go pricing for ngrok

Today, we are delighted to announce our Pay-as-you-go pricing plan, designed to meet the needs of our customers who use ngrok to deliver apps and APIs in production environments. With this plan, you pay only for what you use–active endpoints. These are endpoints sending or receiving data via ngrok service in a billing cycle.

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Why Pay-as-you-go?

The core principle behind our Pay-as-you-go pricing is simple: for usage of the ngrok service, you are charged based on your actual consumption rather than a fixed, predetermined price, aligning the value you receive with the price you pay. Usage-based pricing enables ngrok customers to scale their costs based on the value they deliver to their end users, driving efficiency to application infrastructure costs.  

Pay only for active endpoints

That is why we are anchoring on active endpoints - the distinct number of TCP addresses or domains that you transmit data through in a given month. As applications and APIs get released, this is the core unit of consumption adopted by our customers.

You only incur charges for resources in active use. If you have live endpoints that remain idle, there are no associated costs. If you have agents deployed in various locations, you don’t have to remember to take them offline or remove them–you don’t pay for them unless a session is actively transmitting data. This enables you to ship ngrok embedded in devices or applications, at scale, without the burden of upfront billing. 

Random/ephemeral domains are not offered in this plan making it an ideal choice for production environments. Customers are protected from programmatic or dynamic generation of end-points, giving you tighter control over usage.

Unlocking and scaling new use cases with Pay-as-you-go pricing

There has been a rapid rise in the usage of ngrok to deliver enterprise applications and APIs. Our service plays a vital role for many customers who need secure connections to external networks. This includes scenarios where they must access their customers’ networks or connect to IoT devices and machines operating in partner networks. Pay-as-go pricing is a good fit for these emerging use cases.

Ingress for External Networks - Customer Environments

The pay-as-you-go model is very effective for scaling easily. You can get started quickly, without incurring massive upfront costs or locking into annual contracts. This is well-suited for growing businesses, especially as they transition from using ngrok in development to running apps on ngrok in production environments.

For example: A leading DevOps and testing platform relies on ngrok to securely access their customer’s network. Their platform connects to on-premise Jenkins servers and Git repositories, to integrate code into their CI/CD platform. ngrok provides them with frictionless network access, accelerating their time to value. This plan works well for them because their billing scales as they acquire more customers. 

Ingress for External Networks - Devices and Machines

Pay-as-you-go pricing is a suitable choice for scenarios where you need to build prototypes or run pilot projects initially and then scale rapidly. For example: A pioneering start-up that builds robots to automate materials handling and manufacturing workflows, uses ngrok to establish consistent and reliable connections to these devices deployed in their customer’s environment. This plan allows them to easily test a variety of robots to automate warehousing and manufacturing workflows, fostering their innovation process. ngrok is now embedded in a large number of robots to securely connect to APIs on these devices. 

Freedom to experiment with Pay-as-you-go pricing

As you build more apps and APIs, you can explore new ideas without the constraints of long-term license commitments. Pay-as-you pricing gives you the flexibility to try out new offerings and business models and adapt easily to ever-changing needs. 

A Better Fit for Production Environments 

While ngrok is much loved by developers and IT Operations teams, we recognized the need to improve our pricing and packaging. With the widespread adoption of ngrok across a variety of production use cases, we’ve listened to feedback from multiple customers who believe that pay-as-you-go pricing would better support their use of ngrok in production environments. We built pay-as-you-go pricing to align with growing needs of your business - your billing scales only as you expand your customer base, connect to more devices or scale delivery of your suite of enterprise apps and APIs in production. 

Get started with ngrok today, and only pay for what you use

Over the past few months, we have released key capabilities such as Always-On GSLB, Ingress Controller for Kubernetes and SDKs for Go and Rust. With the launch of Pay-as-go-pricing, we are excited to deliver yet another critical capability to serve production workloads.

You can sign up today and get started. Explore our pricing here, and refer to our documentation for insights into how pricing works. If you have any questions or encounter any issues, don’t hesitate to reach out. Connect with us on Twitter, the ngrok community on Slack or contact us at support@ngrok.com.

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