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StartTunnel is a very good comparison. You can think of Blindport as a hosted StartTunnel.
For multiple services, you can get a wildcard for 2.5x the price of a single domain/subdomain. So for subdomains of the same base it becomes a flat fee. Or you can get a full IP and have a managed "StartTunnel" for slightly less than the cost of a VPS.
To separate public domains, Blindport is actually cheaper than the VPS. All users of Blindport become some kind of anonymity set. On your VPS, anyone doing a reverse DNS query would easily link together the different domains pointing at it. So for equivalent anonymity you would need a new VPS each time. In Blindport you could get a separate account or just add a different subscriptions and external observers wouldn't be able to tell if two services routed through Blindport actually belong to the same entity.
The trust boundary is the same for Blindport and StartTunnel. At the end of the day, the traffic passes encrypted through a VPS in both cases (SNI, timining, volume, ...).
Since the trust is similar, it boils down to price. Blindport is cheaper and has ingress redundancy. You can expect higher uptime, faster setup, and no maintenance effort from your side. A VPS on the other hand gives you more flexibility and "recycling" opportunities, since you could use it for other stuff since you already have it.
The next time I spin up a new server for a specific use case that I thought I'd want to expose to someone beyond myself, say friends/family, or maybe beyond that, my plan was to try StartTunnel.
My takeaway is that StartTunnel is probably more expensive (ultimately the cost of the VPS, ~$5–10/mo), and there may be more upkeep, even if StartTunnel makes that pretty easy. Blindport looks like a potentially simpler, cheaper path if it’s just one service. The trade-off appears to be trusting the Blindport relay instead of the VPS provider you would pick to run StartTunnel?
I’m wondering how this scales if you want to expose multiple services from the same home server, each with its own domain so that the people you share with don’t see the other services or know they’re coming from the same place.
A table of my current understanding of the comparison (correct me if I'm wrong):
If anyone else stumbles across this post weighing these two use cases, what’s your read on the tradeoffs? Does Blindport’s “customer-owned wildcard base” option change the math for multiple services, or would you still be paying per hostname? And for StartTunnel, is running your own reverse proxy on the Pi the preferred way to keep services isolated behind separate domains?