It uses basic auth at the edge to protect the endpoint being used by anyone. The technical advantage to self hosting is bandwidth throughput. For instance, If your using a css framework that is bulky on dev, but then minimized for prod, you will often find the ngrok/cloudflare tunnels too slow to load the local host assets.

At this point, my son had done 18 months of ABA and was being used to train new RBT's (high turnover field of course). The prescribed hitting was creating behavioral problems at home, but was being used to justify extensive hours of ABA.

I dont think a profit driven model is great for these kids.

If you added a feature to push/fetch and sync the local development database from an s3 (or like bucket) it would solve one of the real core problems of new developers getting started.

That nginx proxy probably works 99.999% of the time, but oh boy, is that .001% going to tick someone off. Proxy's always add a small layer of complexity that can fubar things in strange ways, i know from running many of proxies in production just fine until that tiny little app/proxy config change that borks it. I haven't dug in enough yet, but i hope it can be bypassed.

Ambitious project that I think has some legs. A lot of devs dislike docker and many teams struggle to use it well anyway (for instance, a good dev Dockerfile is usually not the same as a good production Dockerfile). You will need to make this more "IAC-like" if you want to beat it though, imho.

Keep going and good luck!

Yes, i'm aware of firefox profiles. it's implementation is hard to use and generally confusing. it requires going to secret pages, and quite frankly, i found it worked like hot garbage.