Pico: An open-source Ngrok alternative built for production traffic
Pico is an open-source alternative to Ngrok. Unlike most other open-source tunnelling solutions, Pico is designed to serve production traffic and be simple to host (particularly on Kubernetes). Upstream services connect to Pico and register endpoints. Pico will then route requests for an endpoint to a registered upstream service via its outbound-only connection. This means you can expose your services without opening a public port. Pico runs as a cluster of nodes in order to be fault tolerant, scale horizontally and support zero downtime deployments. It is also easy to host, such as a…
Pico: An open-source Ngrok alternative built for production traffic launched on May 14, 2024 with 244 votes, #194 of 4,539 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.
In plain words
Pico is an open-source tunneling solution designed for production workloads, offering an alternative to Ngrok. It allows upstream services to register endpoints and route traffic through outbound-only connections, eliminating the need to expose public ports. Built for scalability and reliability, Pico runs as a cluster of nodes supporting horizontal scaling, fault tolerance, and zero-downtime deployments. It integrates easily with Kubernetes environments through Deployments or StatefulSets behind HTTP load balancers.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
An open-source alternative to Ngrok, designed to serve production traffic and be simple to host (particularly on Kubernetes) - andydunstall/piko
In the maker’s words, at launch
Pico is an open-source alternative to Ngrok. Unlike most other open-source tunnelling solutions, Pico is designed to serve production traffic and be simple to host (particularly on Kubernetes). Upstream services connect to Pico and register endpoints. Pico will then route requests for an endpoint to a registered…
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
