Port Buddy
- Free allowance
- HTTP and UDP tunnels are free.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- documented8 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-05checked 2026-11-04 (live); stale on 2026-12-05
| Free tier | HTTP and UDP tunnels are free. No credit card. TCP tunnels from $5/month. Transfer is unmetered on every plan: no bandwidth caps, no overage charges. unit unlimited; metered on none |
|---|---|
| Price | USD 0 |
| Limits |
the vendor reserves the right to throttle, suspend or block an account or tunnel it judges abusive |
| Binding | none The vendor claims no byte cap on any plan, so nothing in the vocabulary binds at 1 TiB/month. The unestablished part is not volume but performance and stability: no live tunnel was run, and the free endpoint is a vendor-assigned hostname that would break a stable WireGuard address if it changes per session. |
| Identity | email "Start for free" and "No credit card"; the free tier requires an account, no card. |
| Egress | Transfer is unmetered on every plan: no bandwidth caps, no overage charges. HTTP and UDP tunnels are free; TCP tunnels start at USD 5/month. free allowance: unmetered, per the vendor's own sentence; no number because no cap is claimed |
| Interface | cli, rest CLI install and a web dashboard; "Install the CLI". |
| Tooling | The vendor CLI: "$portbuddy tcp 5432"; a udp subcommand is advertised. |
| Composes with | Port Buddy UDP plus a local wg-quick listener gives an endpoint with no VM, at the cost of a vendor-controlled hostname. |
| Reliability | Tunnel hostname is vendor-assigned; the public port comes from a reservation in the range 40000-60000 that is reused for the same local port, so the address tends to keep working; a UDP tunnel with no traffic for five minutes is cleaned up. |
| Notes | Not a PaaS: a tunnel in front of a client process, so it belongs with ngrok, pinggy and zrok rather than with the platforms. Free tier is advertised as one HTTP or UDP tunnel. The record's egress field said 'none published' and the plan carries an explicit unmetered sentence that was not found on the page first read. Turns 'none published' into a documented absence with the vendor's own words, which is the strongest form a no-number finding can take. Replaces a volume-quota entry that read 'no published byte allowance' with the vendor's affirmative no-cap statement, which is a different claim. No byte constraint is claimed by the vendor, so volume-quota is the wrong kind; what a reader plans against is a vendor-controlled hostname and an unmetered but unstated relay capacity. The record's note reasoned that a free tier is 'normally shaped below 1 TiB', which the vendor's own page now contradicts. The offer and the absence of a cap are both on a vendor page with a URL and a date, which is the documented rung. The record was unverified because the first page read carried no volume sentence. Names what remains unproven now that the offer itself is documented. |
| Evidence note | documented The free UDP offer and the no-cap sentence are quoted from the vendor with a date. What stays unverified is the transport: no tunnel was run, so throughput, session lifetime and hostname churn on the free tier are unmeasured, and a measured push would raise the rung. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 8
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-23 | portbuddy.dev/ | "HTTP and UDP tunnels are free. No credit card." and "UDP is free; tcp tunnels from $5/month" |
| 2026-10-23 | portbuddy.dev/docs/udp-tunnels | 'You get back a public host and port, such as net-proxy-2.portbuddy.dev:41207, and datagrams sent there are forwarded to your local socket. Unlike TCP tunnels, UDP is available on every plan.' |
| 2026-11-03 | portbuddy.dev/docs/http-tunnels | an HTTP tunnel caps a single request at 10 MB |
| 2026-11-03 | portbuddy.dev/terms | the terms give a fair-use line for traffic with no byte figure |
| 2026-11-03 | portbuddy.dev/terms | the terms reserve throttling, suspension and blocking |
| 2026-11-03 | portbuddy.dev/docs/udp-tunnels | an idle UDP tunnel is removed after five minutes; the same page says a reservation is reused for the same local port |
| 2026-11-03 | portbuddy.dev/ | the vendor states no bandwidth cap and no overage charge on any plan |
| 2026-11-04 | portbuddy.dev/terms | the terms name high-traffic production use beyond subscription limits as abuse and publish no byte cap |
More fields 6
| wg path | inside-udp |
|---|---|
| wg detail | The free tier exposes a public UDP endpoint that forwards datagrams to a local UDP socket, so a WireGuard handshake can be carried inside it. |
| ingress | udp |
| volume stated | The vendor publishes no monthly byte allowance for the free UDP tunnel; the only stated limits are tunnel count and TCP being paid. |
| bytes transit | yes |
| transit note | Port Buddy relays the datagrams; the client's local process terminates them. |
Unknown values 2
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer