You should start thinking of your own time this way. Everyone has an hourly rate, how much do you spend solving problems like this?

Yes but 1) I enjoy solving problems like this and 2) I’m not working and being paid for all that extra free time I have anyways. There is also a non-zero intangible cost to offloading all tasks. Based on your rationale a highly paid Google engineer would have a maid, chef, and Ikea furniture assembler and the only thing the guy would do is code all day because that’s the maximum value use of his/her time. Obviously most people do not do that. I’d probably pay up to $100 per day to a toilet paper monopoly so that I didn’t have to use my hands everyday. Luckily toilet paper isn’t in a monopoly situation, so I’m not going to hand over $100/day to Charmin even though that’s the value I get from their product.

But I think that point is moot because a service that costs $X in perpetuity must justify its costs with continuous new features and must be compared to alternatives. If I just wanted a basic proxy I’d run one of the open source alternatives in a container. If it required too much work, make a contribution to the project to make it easier for everyone. The value of ngrok is in its extra features, but the bulk of the cost is probably in setting up an actual VM and running it, which isn’t that hard these days and can be automated even in an open source offering. When considering the value of ngrok you can’t simply justify it by saying how much time it saves you. You have to compare it to the market, which includes free open source alternatives. So the real question to ask is whether the added features of ngrok plus the time savings over using some open source alternative is worth the extra cost over the time span I’d be using it. If time span is infinite, then maybe it makes sense to do a one-time extra cost of learning how to setup an open source alternative and paying a bit less for the actual VM costs. Maybe ngrok’s added features are indeed worth paying for. But telling yourself your time is not worth looking into this is a lazy justification for unnecessary subscriptions.