This is the honest version of why SessionForge exists. Not the polished founder narrative. Not the "I saw a market gap" story. The real one: I was trying to use Claude Code from a coffee shop and kept losing my session every time my laptop went to sleep, and I got fed up enough to build something.
I do most of my development work on a desktop machine. It's fast, it stays on, and it runs Claude Code well. The issue is that I'm not always at my desk. I work in different places — couch, coffee shop, occasionally an actual office. I wanted the Claude Code session running on my desktop to still be there when I picked up my laptop somewhere else.
This sounds like a solved problem. It is not a solved problem.
The naive solution is SSH into the desktop and use screen or tmux. That works, until it doesn't. You need the machine to be reachable, which means either a static IP (not what most desktops have), a VPN you control (Tailscale, which I was running), or a jump host of some kind. You need to remember which screen session is running what. You need to reconnect and scroll back through whatever happened while you weren't looking. And you need your SSH client to not drop the connection when you switch from wifi to cellular, which is not a bet I'd take.
I had this working with Tailscale and a combination of screen sessions and a little bash script that printed session names. It was functional in the same way that a flathead screwdriver is functional for a Phillips screw. You can make it work but you're doing damage in the process.
Teleport is the serious answer to "how do you manage SSH access to a bunch of machines." Certificate-based auth, session recording, audit logs, a web terminal. I had heard about it for a long time and finally installed the Community Edition when I was trying to get this remote Claude Code workflow under control.
Teleport Community Edition was free. Then, in June 2024, it wasn't. Teleport removed the free tier and moved to a pricing model that starts around $70 per seat per month. For a one-person shop, that's $840 a year for tooling that was solving a personal workflow problem. That's not a serious option.
I uninstalled Teleport the same afternoon I saw the pricing page.
I spent a few weeks trying different combinations before I started building anything. Here's the honest rundown:
ngrok: Easy to set up, good for exposing a local port. The free tier throttles you aggressively, the URLs change every restart unless you're paying, and there's no persistence concept — it's a tunnel, not a session manager.
Cloudflare Tunnel: Better than ngrok for persistent exposure, but still fundamentally a network tunnel. You're connecting to a port on a machine, not to a session on that machine. The session problem — maintaining context, resuming work, knowing what's running — isn't solved by tunneling.
VSCode Remote SSH / Cursor Remote: Actually pretty good, but it requires the IDE to stay open on the host machine and it ties you to the specific editor. I wanted something that worked from a browser, from my phone, from anything.
JupyterHub: Designed for notebooks, not terminal sessions. Not the right tool.
None of these solved the actual problem, which was: I have a running Claude Code session. I close my laptop. I open it somewhere else. I want to be in that session with no setup, seeing exactly what happened while I was gone, and able to keep going.
The first version was embarrassingly simple. A Go binary that runs on the machine where your sessions live. It connects outbound to a cloud relay — which means no inbound firewall rules, no port forwarding, no static IP required. The relay knows about the machine. The web dashboard knows about the relay. You log in from anywhere and you see your machines.
Sessions are persistent by design. When you start a session in SessionForge, it's running in a managed PTY that stays alive independent of your connection. Close your browser. Put your laptop to sleep. Come back an hour later. The session is exactly where you left it. The output that accumulated while you were gone is in the history. You didn't lose anything.
The web terminal is xterm.js connected via WebSocket. It's a real terminal — color codes, resize, keyboard shortcuts, everything you'd expect from a terminal running locally. The only difference is that the PTY it's connected to is on a different machine.
I built this for myself, and then I was telling a developer friend about it and I screen-shared the dashboard. He immediately said "I need this." Not "that's interesting" — "I need this." That's a different kind of response.
The other signal was that the problem space kept growing as I thought about it. Teams with multiple developers need shared access to sessions. Companies have compliance requirements around session recording. People running AI agents want webhooks when a session crashes. None of these are niche requirements — they're the obvious next questions when you start taking session management seriously.
SessionForge is a commercial product now. There's a free plan, a Pro tier, and a Team tier. The pricing is built around what the tools that used to solve this problem used to charge when they had free tiers — not around what enterprise vendors charge for SOC 2 compliance packages.
I want to be clear about what SessionForge is optimized for, because it's relevant to whether it's the right tool for you.
We are not a VPN replacement. We are not doing Kubernetes access proxying or database proxying. We don't have a full identity provider integration or an enterprise access policy engine. Teleport does those things, and if you need them, you should pay for Teleport.
What we are: a persistent session manager with a web terminal, machine registry, session recording, an API, and webhooks. Built for developers who run things on remote machines and need to manage them from wherever they happen to be. Priced for teams that don't have $70 a seat per month to spend on this problem.
The install is one command. The agent connects in seconds. The dashboard is immediate. If you've been managing remote sessions with a combination of screen, SSH tunnels, and hoping your connection doesn't drop — try it. The free plan covers one machine, no credit card required.
I built the thing I wished existed. It turns out a lot of other people wished it existed too.