If you've been running a scrappy engineering team — a few developers, a handful of cloud machines, and a need to audit who SSHed where — you've probably noticed the tooling landscape quietly collapse under you over the past 18 months.
Let's go through what happened.
In June 2024, Teleport removed their Community Edition free tier. The product that used to be a reasonable "free for small teams" option now starts at roughly $70 per seat per month on the Cloud plan. For a team of five, that's $4,200 per year just for SSH access management and session recording.
Teleport is a great product. But $70/seat is enterprise pricing, and most of the teams who actually needed the free tier — startups, side projects, consultants managing client machines — can't justify it.
Cloudflare's SSH audit logging feature, part of their Zero Trust Access product, reached end-of-life on March 16, 2026. If you were using it as a lightweight way to record who accessed what, that option is gone unless you move to a paid Cloudflare tier with a more complex configuration.
Cloudflare Zero Trust is excellent for its intended audience. But SSH audit was a simple, low-friction feature that a lot of small shops relied on. Its removal without a straightforward free replacement left a gap.
ngrok's free tier has been getting progressively more restrictive. Connection limits, session timeouts, and bandwidth caps make it increasingly unsuitable for anything resembling production use. If you were using ngrok to expose a machine for remote SSH access, the message is clear: pay up or find another way.
If you're a small team — two to ten developers, a mix of cloud VMs and local dev machines, maybe a client or two whose infrastructure you're managing — you've basically lost your free options for:
Self-hosting Teleport is still an option, technically. But it's a meaningful operational burden — you're running Kubernetes, managing certificates, and handling your own HA setup. For the teams who relied on the free hosted tier, that's not a realistic path.
SessionForge started as a personal tool. The author was running Claude Code sessions across multiple machines and needed a way to manage them from a phone while traveling. What grew out of that is a platform built from first principles around the problem these tools used to solve — without the enterprise pricing.
Here's what SessionForge gives you:
Teleport, Cloudflare Zero Trust, and ngrok are all built for enterprise compliance use cases. Session recording in Teleport is about SOC 2 audit trails. Zero Trust is about identity-based network access. These are real needs — but they're not the same as "I need to know what my contractor is doing on the staging server" or "I need to manage three Claude Code sessions from my phone."
SessionForge is built for the second category. The dashboard is a real-time web terminal, not a PDF report generator. The session recording is there so you can see what happened, not so you can hand it to a compliance officer. The pricing reflects the audience.
The agent installs in under a minute on Linux, macOS, or Windows:
curl -fsSL https://sessionforge.dev/agent | bash -s -- --key YOUR_KEYRegister a machine, spin up a session, and you'll have a live terminal in your browser within 60 seconds. Free plan, no credit card required.
The tools you relied on changed the deal. SessionForge was built to hold the deal steady.