the dns being locked to the pro tier makes localstack pretty useless for independent developers on working on hobby projects that aren’t making any money.
api gateway, lambda function urls, &c all rely on being able to call urls on subdomains, so it makes end-to-end testing and running those services locally impossible. i’m sure you know all this.
maybe i’m misremembering, but i don’t remember this being restricted in the recent past? i can’t afford to pay $28 / mo to test a single lambda endpoint (i can’t afford it period right now). it’s cheaper for me to just repeatedly deploy my infrastructure to aws call live services, albeit slightly more burdensome.
pretty sad. sunk a bunch of time into localstack, and was genuinely excited about it as a tool, just to get burned at the last mile. do what everyone else does and just charge corporate users. if i legalize my app and start selling it, i’ll pay you.
Hi @qkqwfnnwj, thanks for reaching out and sharing this feedback. Indeed, drawing the line between open source and premium/paid features is not always an easy thing to do. In our roadmap, we try to ensure that key features are gradually moved into the community version over time (as we’ve done with several features in the past). 
As far as DNS is concerned, please note that our *.localhost.localstack.cloud domain names are publicly resolvable and should actually also work for basic use cases like API Gateway invocations in the community version - using the <api_id>.execute-api.localhost.localstack.cloud endpoint pattern. More details can be found here: API Gateway V2 | Docs (the article is written for the Pro version, but the domain name format also applies to API GW in the Community version).
Please note that we offer an education grant program to sponsor free Pro licenses for full-time students, and we also sponsor non-profit and educational organizations. We may also be able to support you if you’re working on an open source project that leverages LocalStack. If either of these cases apply, please drop us a short line at info@localstack.cloud . 
Thanks!
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yes, thank you for the info & quick reply. and sorry, i overreacted after a day of frustration.
i couldn’t resolve any requests to localhost.localstack.cloud from my machine. i spent a lot of time in the docs, and they seemed to suggest that this was now a pro feature. but that was my own misunderstanding of both the docs and probably how dns works 
. turns out that your domain (and other similar domains, e.g. lvh.me) were unresolvable using my isp’s (verizon fios) default dns, and after switching to cloudflare dns everything seems fine.
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