Pipenet
A Modern Alternative to Localtunnel
Details
- External ID
- 46680597
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Pipenet
- Website domain
- pipenet.dev
- Launched
- Jan. 19, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 114
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9123847167325428
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey HN!localtunnel's server needs random ports per client. That doesn't work on Fly.io or behind strict firewalls.We rewrote it in TypeScript and added multiplexing over a single port. Open-source and 100% self-hostable.Public instance at *.pipenet.dev if you don't want to self-host.Built at Glama for our MCP Inspector, but it's a generic tunnel with no ties to our infra.https://github.com/punkpeye/pipenet
Enrichment
- Theme
- proxy, dns, and networking tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- modern localtunnel alternative
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic reverse proxy wrapper is feasible, but building a robust multi-client TCP multiplexer over a single port that handles connection lifecycle, buffering, and high-throughput streaming requires non-trivial networking knowledge.
What it would actually take: The architecture involves a Node.js/TypeScript or Go daemon client and a public edge relay server connected via a single multiplexed protocol (such as Yamux, HTTP/2 tunnels, or custom framing over WebSockets/TLS). The hard part is managing concurrent stream state, backpressure, connection reconnects, edge wildcard TLS termination, and host header routing on restricted PaaS environments like Fly.io. A developer needs solid networking and distributed systems knowledge to prevent memory leaks and handle dropped packets gracefully.
Discussion
19 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: localtunnel, ngrok, SSH-based tunnels (bore, rathole), connet, tuns.sh (managed sish instance)
Concerns raised: WebSocket latency overhead compared to SSH-based alternatives, Encryption overhead (RSA key size impacts performance), Scaling capacity with increased demand, Slow performance of existing free tier solutions
Feature requests: TCP and UDP tunneling support, Dockerized version with SSL management (Caddy integration), HTTPS/WebSockets support via SSH tunnels
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 145 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 146 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 82 days after the earliest competitor.
- Port Zero · hn · 2026-07-27 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- RouteLocal · ph · 2026-09-21 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- HTTP-network-relay: Tunnel TCP over HTTP using WebSockets · hn · 2025-12-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust · hn · 2026-04-02 · 115 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- HTTP/3 and raw QUIC client/server APIs for Node.js · hn · 2026-06-08 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- quicktunnel · github · 2026-09-20 · 42 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- tltv · hn · 2026-05-08 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Tunnel.to · hn · 2026-05-28 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.