Ngrok was really cool since I never thought about reverse proxying my localhost before l tried it.
But for the price of ngrok I'm paying for a domain and a 2gb ram/2 CPU VM on hetzner and using SSH tunnels to nginx reverse proxy.
And setting up a shared server for a team with subdomains is just 10 mins of config changes per user - no way they can justify the cost for me.
If it was some symbolic price like 20$/year then I wouldn't bother, otherwise I'll take the VM I can load other random dev crap to when I need it.
And you're using standard web tech to set this up - if you aren't familiar with something required to set this up you will be better off learning it in the long run (if you're the target audience for ngrok) : VM setup, nginx, reverse proxy, SSH tunneling, let's encrypt, domain management/DNS - all valuable fundamental skills to acquire on a small project.
Do you ever run into performance issues with the shared machines at the low end? I've found the shared CPUs can be a little iffy under load but if you're basically running reverse proxying only it must not be an issue
Also do you think you'd pay $40/year? that's less than what you're paying Hetzner for no management.
I wouldn't pay $40/year because the value of having a random instance up with domain/ssl and nginx running all the time has been handy many times so far - worth way more than what I pay for the machine. At this point ngrok would be a downgrade for my use case, but if it was something like 20$/year when I was looking into it I probably wouldn't have bothered setting it up.