frp
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The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
frp puts a service running on your laptop or home server onto the public internet without opening ports on your router. It's the self-hosted answer to ngrok: the frps server runs on any machine with a public IP, the frpc client runs next to your app, and traffic rides the tunnel. Apache 2.0, free, no paid tier.
Both halves are single Go binaries configured in TOML (YAML and JSON work too). It handles TCP, UDP, HTTP and HTTPS, plus STCP, where visitors need a preshared key, and XTCP for direct peer-to-peer transfers. DigitalOcean's cheapest droplet at $4 a month is plenty for the server. Upkeep is close to zero.
Solo developers and homelabbers: free, and the cleanest way off ngrok. Small teams: free, since one frps serves many clients. Larger teams wanting managed identity and access policies should look at Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale instead.
The catch is that you now run an internet-facing gateway. Exposed web services are public unless you turn on the built-in password, and 2026 brought an auth bypass in HTTP routing (fixed in 0.68.1) and an unauthenticated crash in the SSH tunnel gateway (fixed in 0.70.1). Stay current. The promised v2 rewrite is on hold.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything. Apache 2.0, no paid tier, no feature gates. TCP, UDP, HTTP and HTTPS proxies, STCP and XTCP (P2P) modes, token or OIDC client authentication, TLS, per-proxy bandwidth limits, HTTP basic auth, a server dashboard, a client admin UI and Prometheus metrics. Development is funded by sponsors.
Self-hosted: That's the only way to run it. frps needs a machine with a public IP; DigitalOcean's smallest droplet is $4 a month (512 MiB), which is enough for personal tunnels. frpc runs on the machine behind NAT. Both are single binaries with TOML, YAML or JSON config.
Paid: No paid tier and no hosted service. Your only bill is the server with a public IP and its bandwidth.
Free at any scale. Your only bill is a box with a public IP, and DigitalOcean's smallest droplet is $4 a month.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; plus a $4 a month droplet for the server
- Small team
- free; one frps serves many clients and tunnels
- Medium team
- free, but set token or OIDC auth, allowPorts and basic auth before exposing anything
- Large team
- free, though Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale give you managed identity and access policies
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