Today I managed to get two devices behind different NATs (Network Address Translation) talking to each other through TON (based on the work from sddao-v1).

Basically, it’s a TON Relay.

Here’s how it works: Alice (A) and Bob (B) both connect to a Relayer (R). Then messages can go from A to B through R:

A ↔ R ↔ B

Before this, I tried a TURN (Traversal Using Relays around NAT) version, but providers are expensive. For example, Metered currently offers:
• Growth Plan – $99/mo for 150 GB. Overage $0.40/GB (~$400/TB).
• Business Plan – $199/mo for 500 GB. Overage $0.20/GB (~$200/TB).
• Enterprise Plan – $499/mo for 2 TB. Overage $0.10/GB (~$100/TB).

And custom plan available. Can Metered and others provide for $1 - $8 per TB (see below)? I’m not sure 😅

Another option is Cloudflare ($51/TB). GCP, AWS, Azure (~$100 – $300/TB) are significantly more expensive. Twilio is even pricier, at around $400 – $820/TB depending on region.

The upside: easy Web integration and WebRTC support, but it’s pricey.

With TON, all you need for production is a VPS (starting as low as $3–$5) and network bandwidth (on Hetzner up to 20 TB included, with additional TBs costing $1 – $8 each depending on location). For development, you can set up a local network and use it just like in production.

The downside: working via the Web through TON isn’t very convenient yet, but it will be possible using sddao-v1 0.0.6 (https://github.com/systemdesigndao/sddao-v1-builds-public/tree/master/sddao-p2p-0.0.6).

I expect the Relay version will get a different name. For now, I’m finishing E2E encryption, and the chat will be publicly available.

If you have any questions – feel free to DM me.