Everything else in this series hides where you are coming from. Localtonet does the reverse.

It is a tunneling platform. It takes something running on your machine, behind your router, unreachable from the outside, and gives it a public address.

Different problem, opposite direction, and genuinely useful if you have ever needed it.

What Tunneling Is For

Three situations come up constantly.

You are building a web application locally and a payment provider or platform needs to send you a webhook. Their servers cannot reach your laptop. A tunnel gives them an address that can.

You want to show a client work in progress without deploying it anywhere. A tunnel turns your local machine into a live URL for an afternoon.

You have a device, a database or a service on a home network that you need to reach from elsewhere, without opening ports on your router and hoping for the best.

Multi Protocol, Not Just HTTP

Most tunneling tools handle HTTP and stop. Localtonet covers HTTP and HTTPS with automatic SSL certificates, plain TCP for databases and arbitrary services, and, relevantly for this series, proxy tunnels.

TCP support is the one worth noting. Exposing a database or a non web service is a genuinely different capability from exposing a web app, and plenty of tools cannot do it.

Clients run on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Docker, which covers essentially everything.

The Proxy Connection

Localtonet appears in a list of proxy providers because it can tunnel proxy connections, and because the Android client means a phone can become a reachable endpoint.

If you are running your own mobile devices as proxies, a tunnel is how you reach them from outside the network they sit on. That is the overlap, and it makes this a useful companion to a DIY mobile proxy setup rather than a replacement for buying addresses.

A Free Tier That Actually Works

There is a genuine free plan, with paid tiers starting at a couple of dollars a month.

For occasional development work, the free tier is often all you need. For anything persistent, the paid tiers add reserved addresses and higher limits at a price that barely registers.

That pricing is a fraction of what proxy services cost, because it is a fundamentally different and cheaper thing to provide.

Who It Fits

Localtonet suits developers testing webhooks locally, anyone demonstrating work without deploying it, people reaching home network devices remotely, and operators running their own proxy hardware who need to reach it from outside.

Who Might Look Elsewhere

If you want to hide your IP address, this is the wrong tool entirely. It publishes an address rather than concealing one. Our guide to hiding your IP covers what you actually want in that case.

If you want to buy residential or mobile addresses, this does not sell them.

Final Verdict

Localtonet is the odd one out in this series, and it earns its place by solving a real problem well.

Multi protocol tunneling with automatic SSL, TCP support for non web services, clients on every platform, and a free tier that covers most casual use.

If you have ever tried to test a webhook against a laptop, you already know why this exists. Start on the free tier and see whether you ever need to upgrade.