Problem

Pangolin addresses the friction and operational overhead of giving people secure access to internal applications, infrastructure, and field equipment. Traditional VPNs require users and administrators to manage clients, servers, network configurations, and layered ACLs; granting access to one application can become a broader network-engineering task. The economic pain is therefore primarily the staff time, complexity, and security exposure associated with maintaining remote-access infrastructure, rather than a publicly quantified dollar cost. A core use case is allowing authorized employees, contractors, or customers to reach on-premises dashboards, SSH servers, databases, RDP systems, or IoT and industrial equipment without exposing the network directly to the internet.

Product / Service

Pangolin is an open-source, WireGuard-based zero-trust remote-access platform that combines a tunneled reverse proxy with VPN capabilities. Lightweight site connectors create outbound tunnels and use NAT traversal, so organizations can connect networks behind firewalls without public IP addresses or open inbound ports. Users can access web applications through an authenticated browser or connect to private resources through a client, while administrators grant access to specific resources rather than entire networks and apply identity- and context-aware policies.

The delivery model is hybrid: Pangolin Cloud provides a managed service, while organizations can self-host the platform or its nodes for greater control over traffic and infrastructure. The product has a free personal and community offering, paid cloud tiers beginning at $4 per user per month and $9 per user per month, and custom-priced enterprise features such as SIEM log streaming, SCIM, priority support, and SLAs. The benefit is simpler deployment and centralized, granular access control without the friction and broad network exposure of a conventional VPN.

Market

Pangolin competes in zero-trust network access, identity-aware VPN, secure remote access, and tunneled reverse-proxy software. Its named alternatives include Cloudflare Tunnels, Zscaler ZPA, and Ngrok; it also overlaps with VPN and remote-access products such as Tailscale and Twingate. The target market includes IT, OT, IoT, engineering, and organizations operating on-premises applications or distributed infrastructure, with both self-hosting and managed-cloud requirements.

The company is an active YC Summer 2025 startup and has meaningful open-source adoption rather than appearing pre-revenue or pre-launch: its site reports more than 1,000,000 deployments worldwide, while its public GitHub repository shows 21,942 stars. Pangolin publishes commercial cloud and enterprise plans, but the available evidence does not disclose revenue, paid-customer count, or conversion rates, so deployment and community metrics are the clearest available traction indicators.