The decision to start building LynxTrac was not a flash of insight. It was accumulated frustration, mostly at 2am.
At the last place I worked, we had five separate ways to reach production: the corporate VPN, a “backup” VPN that nobody trusted, an SSH bastion, an SSM-based session manager for AWS instances, and a Teleport deployment that handled most of the real traffic. When one of them broke, you’d try the next. When two of them broke, you’d page the team lead. When three broke at the same time (which happened more often than you’d think), you’d wonder why a company that ships infrastructure software couldn’t keep its own infrastructure-access infrastructure running.
The insight, such as it was
A lot of what makes VPNs painful is that they’re doing L3 network tunneling for a problem that’s really L7 access. You don’t need your laptop to believe it’s on the corporate subnet. You need access to one specific service, with clear auth, clear audit, and a clean off-switch. Those are application-layer concerns.
Once you frame it that way, the rest of the stack gets simpler. Outbound-only agents, a relay in the middle, a browser client. The target never listens for you. The network never pretends to be anything other than what it is.
What changed when we built it
Three things, in order of how much they surprised us:
Offboarding got boring. Remove someone from the IdP, and all their sessions die. No “I think I caught all the authorized_keys entries” anxiety. This alone paid for the project in saved compliance work.
Incident response got faster. Page fires. You click the affected host in the dashboard. You have a shell. There’s no “hold on, let me get on the VPN first” step, because there’s no VPN.
MSPs started asking about it. We built this for ourselves. Other teams saw us using it and wanted the same thing. That’s when we realized it wasn’t a one-company problem.
What we’re not
We’re not trying to be Tailscale. We’re not trying to be Teleport. Those are good products; they just solve different problems than we do. Tailscale wants your network to feel flat. Teleport wants a full identity-aware access plane. We want to make it boring to reach one server and get out.
What comes next
More of the same, mostly. We’re filling out the log analysis side, adding more integrations on the cloud governance side, and working on making the agent even quieter when nothing’s happening. No roadmap surprises coming.
If you’re tired of your VPN, you’re the audience. If your VPN is fine, your VPN is fine. That’s also a reasonable answer.
More on how this works in practice: the features overview, or email [email protected] with questions.
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