Public mock hosting

A mock gives your team an HTTP endpoint before the real dependency is ready. Use it for a frontend in progress, a shared demo or deliberate error and delay scenarios. Echo can run a mock locally on the desktop for free or publish it to the public hosting service at mock.gapfy.io on a paid Echo plan. A public hosted mock keeps answering without your desktop running.

Local desktop mocks intercept requests sent by Echo itself; they do not open an HTTP listener for another application.

Choose where the mock runs

  • Local desktop: keep requests on your machine while authoring and experimenting. Included in every Echo plan, Free among them.
  • Public mock hosting: give another machine a URL it can call directly, even with your desktop closed. Hosting is part of Echo Pro and Pro AI. Pro AI is coming soon for new subscriptions.
  • Inside your .NET application: use Mock.Client or Mock.Server with rules fetched through an application key on a paid Echo plan. This uses the paid rule feed, separately from the public hosted URL; your application keeps its own address.

Publish your first mock

  1. Open Mocks in Maestro and select the workspace that owns the mock.
  2. Create a server and add a route with an HTTP method, path pattern, status and response. Choose a static response or a contract. You can also start from a mock saved and synced by the desktop.
  3. Open the server's public hosting panel and enable hosting. Publishing needs a paid Echo plan. On that plan you can publish a mock in your own space as its owner; publishing a team mock needs the Echo/ManageHosting permission, granted by default to the organization administrator.
  4. Copy the exact base URL shown by the panel and append your route path. The host name alone is not a mock endpoint.
  5. Call the route from the consuming application and check the response, including X-Echo-Mock.

Contracts let you generate structured responses and keep versions. Static responses are useful when you need an exact body.

An organization on a paid Echo plan can have up to 25 published mock servers at once. This is a hard limit: the 26th publication is refused until you disable hosting for one of the existing servers. The plan also includes 50,000 public mock requests per month per seat. This monthly allowance is measured for usage and alerts; exceeding it does not, by itself, stop the host from serving requests. A separate operational limit of 300 requests per minute can still return 429.

On Echo Free, the public hosting panel still shows your mock's status and explains that the plan does not include public hosting. Enabling hosting and rotating its public identifier are unavailable. Local desktop mocks and contracts remain available. An organization administrator can change the plan in Settings > Billing when public hosting is needed.

Share deliberately

Anyone who knows the public URL can call its routes. It is not protected by an eck_ application key. Use invented data, keep credentials out of bodies and headers, and share the URL only with its intended audience.

The public hosting panel can disable hosting or rotate the public identifier and issue a new URL. Rotation means updating callers. If a paid plan ends after its grace period, a published mock keeps its URL and public identifier but automatically stops answering: the public host returns 503 mock-server-suspended with Retry-After: 300 by default. Restoring a paid plan resumes it without republishing once the host refreshes its rules. A separate suspension set on the mock server needs an operator to lift it; a platform kill switch can expire on its own. Changing the plan alone does not clear either while it is active. Refresh the panel to inspect its current state.

Bring the rules into your application

Applications and keys explains the separate ServeMocks permission used by the paid .NET rule feed. Choose this path when your own application should serve or intercept requests using Echo rules at its own address, rather than calling the public hosted URL.