Hey mtogo, good question.

We often develop sites on our laptops. The more complicated sites are, the more there is to sync around (databases, dependencies to install, version control commits, &c). Showoff is a quick way for us to get feedback from clients or each other without adding overhead to our development process.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

Funny, I thought you mentioned the VPS because you could still reverse tunnel and share the app in your laptop without deploying. I was going to say that it's still a good idea since the day pass is just $1.

p.s. surprised they didn't go for 99 cents

The main page seems focused on simplicity and short sentences. I think they thought that $0.99 would have looked too noisy compared to $1.

It's possible that they are also pandering to people like me who dislike prices written in that way. I am annoyed by the chore of mentally adding one to every price ending in 99 cents, and I respect sellers who write prices like that less.

No, you can reverse tunnel through a VPS and get the same effect, but you're paying 2-5x as much for virtually the same thing (unless you already have a VPS).

I work remotely 100% of the time (and not always in the same location). The use case for me is to quickly show a feature to coworkers without having to commit/push to a remote server. Especially if the feature needs immediate feedback and is not completely baked/finished.

You can still just use an SSH tunnel on your VPS... no committing/pushing required.

Can you explain how? I am a newbie to web development. I have been making sites locally on my machine and using heroku to deploy online. I am thinking of getting VPS hosting.

In the simplest case, something like:

ssh -R8000:127.0.0.1:80 my.vps.com

This will forward all connections to http://my.vps.com:8000/ to port 80 on your local machine.

Adjust ports as necessary.

Then you also have the VPS where you can actually host a copy of your app - but that's off-topic.

Thanks for bringing HTTPS up, that's another good use-case for Showoff. If you're developing a web app that needs to be tested with HTTPS and don't want to mess with creating a self-signed cert, Showoff can help you out.

It's also really nice for testing web hooks or API callback URLs against a local web server (e.g. ecommerce sites with IPN, &c). If you sign up for an unlimited account, you can choose a permanent URL to use for your tunnel (e.g. "my-name.showoff.io").

The latter feature is a pretty big deal, imo.

Working independently on a project or projects with distinct clients who either need or want to give input/feedback on feature development can be greatly alleviated: work up a quick prototype, show off from my local dev machine (never have to touch a server), call/IM my-name.showoff.io, and they get to see it right away, in the same medium they will eventually be using it. This is so much nicer than sending a wireframe or design of a feature.

The long-term benefit is that the my-name.showoff.io URL can be pretty easy to recall & reuse for any number of clients & features.

A surprising number of web developers don't have a VPS.

Good point about the HTTP/HTTPS we will get that clarified on the website.