It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
> for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.
That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc
We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.
AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
It’s definitely the best version. I’m seeing so many amazing open source projects since people who once had the vision, but not the coding chops, can now build what they imagine. I myself am building a personal OS that connects to everything and it’s way more fun to build things and use them yourself vs just paying for some other software. Especially when that software can be enshittified or start to squeeze its users like you mentioned.
I'm also seeing people who previously had little interest in coding or understanding systems suddenly become empowered to pump out and deploy unmaintainable trash faster than their peers can resolve the problems they generate.
> AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
I got out of IT partially because I could see the writing on the wall. The "load bearing Excel sheet" is one thing, manageable if you could catch the person who wrote it in time before they depart or die and know your way around Excel - there's only so many ways to achieve a desired goal (unless the author used VBA, at which point all bets are off, and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet).
But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure (i.e. isn't hackable in a few seconds by anyone who manages to compromise some dingus's laptop? Oh hell no. I'm outta there, I'm too old for this crap.
Oh it gets better (not the OP but I think the following is even worse).
That DLL hooks into SCADA and sometimes sends updates to a PLC controlling safety critical equipment. When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows. The guy who wrote it died in an (unrelated) industrial accident involving a runaway forklift after leaving the company. Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
sadly this is coming to your linux-distro in no time! Far too many single-dev core building block which are now adding features at breakneck speed conversing with AI only.
> But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure
It's also astonishingly stupid. I don't want a one-off program for everything. I want a well-designed and battle-tested program that I can extend with AI, and that has a ton of people's AIs directed at it, constantly finding bugs, posting them on the bugtracker, and writing and debating pull requests.
I can't comprehend people who think that everything should be built over and over again, and that that will be safe, practical or cheap. It's like they're telling me that I should design a new language for each conversation that I have. Why would I?
The worst part is how far the capabilities of AI are from that dream anyway. They can't even write readable, intelligible code. They're being celebrated for being able to notice buffer overrun errors in code that people would also notice if anybody had ever really looked at some particular span of code in the last 10 years. It's finding errors in move fast and break things code and code that has been maintained by a weirdo professor in his spare time for free and half the economy somehow relies on. That's not magic, its a sign of how sloppy things got.
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
No, they won't. There's nothing wrong with a vibecoded one-off program, at least not that another vibecoded one-off program can't fix.
Source code is now object code, and vice versa. And AI-written code is more secure than human-written code, not less. Deal with it. We won't be going back.
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
B2B maybe? Usually these businesses thrive solely on flirting with the CTO and getting them to sign a lucrative contract and then mandate internal usage. I'm speaking from experience.
I think the argument may be that it doesn't justify this - that the main benefit of the SaaS platform has been to provide 1500+ people with something to do - and that perhaps the SaaS platform doesn't really add enough value to justify its existence or the company's valuation.
I don't really have a point of view on this since I've only used the browser extension (though I don't have it installed at present, thankfully) so the SaaS part of the business might be amazingly useful or it might not: I'm just laying out what I infer the argument in this sub-thread to be.
> Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.
I used to use Postman daily almost ten years ago. Then as my last hurrah before retirement, I took an embedded job that didn't involve me beating on a web API, so I didn't use Postman anymore.
So imagine that I hear about this "Postman" product that involves subscriptions, and AI, and "valued at $X billion" and all this crap, and you can see how I seriously thought that there was another product called "Postman" that wasn't the product I used to use. Turns out...
Someone should vibe-code a VC death clock for developer tools. Enter a company, and it will deduce from its last funding round and headcount the moment it all goes to shit.
In an utlimate twist of irony such a tool could itself pivot to investors because the moment it gets really bad is also the moment to invest in the competition.
I'm not saying that's my strategy with Bugsink, but I'm not saying it isn't either.
I logged in to postman today after 3 years to use some public API, and god, it was so damn unusable. It took me navigating through "workspace", "environments", etc etc before I could hit the simplest of http endpoints.
For some reason, it is very popular in my country (Costa Rica). Every freelancer I’ve worked with only knows about postman
It’s like it was very popular back in the day and people never got the memo there’s better options out there
Hey thanks for sharing the APIs You Won't Hate Link! I'm one of the cofounders of the community. I've had a good time with Bruno, personally. Being git-enabled is a big plus.
If you've got other suggestions, I'd love to give them a look!
Insomnia has enshittified over the past few years too, its original author started https://yaak.app/ and it's pretty alright for most of my Postman-relevant use. Not as heavy on automation or API-documentation, but for testing endpoints it's been great.
It seems like cursed(blessed) niche? In search of alternatives couple of years ago, I'm stumbled upon Mockoon which looked really like a single person project. Now, judging by their webpage, I see they are going the same way
That's just GUIs being easier to use than CLIs for most people. After all, that's why Postman got popular - it's a GUI to do curl without the CLI! Or Handbrake to avoid using ffmpeg. Or various "paint" applications to rotate images instead of using imagemagik.
The problem is that Postman decided to want to be a business and took VC money.
10 years ago I totally get that but these days there's plugins built into every IDE that can smooth over the annoyances of testing an API via curl without having to invoke paying for Postman and dealing with all of its nonsense.
Of course now that I said that today I'd probably just have Claude hit the API for me, or build a dashboard to test it, I really don't know how Postman continues to exist.
Postman valued at 5 billon? WTF? I mean the IT industry lives in a fart cloud honestly. I really really think everything is just a little bit overvalued, isn't it?
People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.
> People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.
They should but Bash escaping/encoding is nasty and most terminals have a hard time using the mouse to reliably edit a cURL command, especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output. And it gets oh so tiring when the "copy cURL" command includes about 1000 bytes worth of Cookie headers full of analytics garbage.
That's why Postman became a thing in the first place.
Yes, that's true. You can suffer a lot escaping things out, but is also a valuable lesson! Not promoting those extreme cases, but many many times a few simple curl calls can save your day.
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
I think most people here on HN is within or close by the "Innovators" part of the "Technology adoption life cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle). When Postman hit mainstream, it was already bloated and ruined, and "Innovators" had already moved on to something else, but for Postman that's just the beginning, as they're in the "Early Majority" part, and still have a tail to ride, so investors and everyone else can extract all the value from the remaining s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ users.
Yes a prime example of enshittification. You attract attention making something humble in scope but good.. but then it is compelled to become something much more. Same story with Coursera imo
I was looking to see if someone had posted a reaction to this part, because if no one had, I was going to! I don't disagree with the parent comment at all, but if curl is an example of a tiny project, I'm not sure what could possibly be considered large. It's literally the first example I'd give if asked for an example of an open source utility getting deployed on like, everything in the world.
Weird take. Just because you can use curl it doesn’t mean you can’t value a GUI to be able to store and manipulate requests quickly and view a formatted response body.
I use postman all the time to explore apis. Sure I could do it from the command line, but this is quicker and it saves my request payloads.
(Though now I’m obviously open to suggestions for better tools)
Weird take. I thought for myself about the problem and solved it rather than externalize such and end up locked into an increasingly abusive relationship.
Been using homegrown scripts designed around wget and curl, accessible as shell aliases so I save time never downloading Postman or developing muscle memory for it, yet can still explore APIs
There's an idea for a better tool; the one you patch right in to your workflow to avoid context switches to a GUI mental model; I just focus on computer generating data rather than color of the virtual captains chair
Not sure if you’re trolling but writing “homegrown scripts as shell aliases” is not faster than a gui. I totally agree Postman is enshittified, but when I just want to see a sample response for given input data, it does the job. Sure I’d like a more lightweight tool, but there’s no way I’m “context switching” to writing shell scripts when I just want to check a single endpoint. (I’d also wager than in many cases, opening a gui and hitting send on a pre-saved request is faster than using an llm too)
You can do what you like though, my original comment was against the gatekeeping and punching down. I don’t care one way or another what tool you use, but let’s not make people inferior because they aren’t using a TUI for everything.
This is why the right to fork exists in open source licenses. It’s easier than ever now, too, thanks to LLMs. You might even be able to oneshot forking and removing the malware and rebranding and rebuilding f/oss crapware these days.
I’ve been considering setting up a nonprofit solely to do this and to republish things like Mattermost, Stats, Bitwarden, etc with the corporate antifeatures ripped out.
Oh, my mistake! I always assumed it was f/oss that slowly boiled the frog. Turns out it wouldn’t have been in the running for consideration in my daily use stack anyway.
Who still uses Postman? In my experience it became insanely slow and bloated. Switched to Bruno. IMO, Postman is like uTorrent, everybody heard about it and many install because of inertia.
It's one of those things that have become "enterprise." There's always been better competitors out there, but it was so big, it's the easy choice for companies that are too lazy to do proper/fast vetting.
We went to bruno years ago and has been good. Nice to be able to store the request definitions in git. But to be honest, don't really need any of these tools anymore.
Working in healthcare, and Postman got decertified by our Cyber team for this. We all switched to Bruno overnight. Their sales team is pinging us like gangbusters though.
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.".
I dropped them when they first started forcing you to have an account and from them only used it when work made it mandatory, in some cases we even dropped them for other alternatives (http with source in git, scripts..etc)
I have been building Kreya [1] for over 6 years now as a Postman alternative. It's offline-first and privacy focused with a storage format made for git.
In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...
I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today. The best version of it was just a logger and a formatter on top of an http client. The proto import was nice for gRPC. Who thought that relatively simple tool needed accounts and MCPs and whatever else they've thrown into it?
> I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today.
You can’t have a unicorn valuation built on a simple offline client.
This is basically standard SV play book - first step is „fix“ it to have a cloud component/account. Then store some of the data in cloud only - say for example for team sharing or a „workspace“. Then make some features paid only. Then ramp up the enshitification till metrics show it’s saturated and users will bear no more
I am just going to build my own free little http client (miss the days when postman was just that).
Building my own client here - https://github.com/ag3ntsc4rn/librepost
Feel free to contribute
I've been using Insomnia whenever I can since before Covid. Its been nice, but ever since they started pushing accounts so aggressively, I've switched to Yaak to get back to that feel of a simple API client that prompted me to switch to Insomia in the first place. 100% recommend. https://yaak.app/
That looks appealing but the existence of a Pricing page tells me it's just a matter of time.
I have a sense that a dumb Web API testing UI application is really not that hard to get AI to implement. These apps all look about the same for a reason. So maybe there will be a prevailing FOSS option that isn't trying to monetize.
Yaak creator here! The commercial-use license is my best attempt at aligning incentives between me and the user, while still funding the project's future.
FYI the license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run from source for any use (including commercial), for free.
Hey! I respect your desire to monetize. And I appreciate that you're trying to make it work through monetizing the commercial side. I think that's a sensible approach.
I'm for the most part just jaded about it all because I've seen Postman and Insomnia slowly boil the frog with increased pushiness towards logins and monetization. If a project is trying to make money at all, I feel it will inevitably grapple with the same issues. Especially for the kind of product where we can have five different options for in the comments section already. But I hope you do succeed in maintaining an honourable revenue stream.
long-time engineer here, begging others to reconsider this attitude. Engineering work has value, engineers deserve to be paid for their time, and the community will have better software if engineers are able to get paid for their time.
Is there another profession where charging a fair price for a product is looked on with derision the way it is with software?
Oh don't get me wrong. I have gotten my company to pay for a lot of good FOSS and services, especially from teams of 1. There just has to be honest value-add potential.
Yep! Fun fact, I made Insomnia too, and started over with Yaak after I sold it and watched it go down the same path. Yaak was my attempt at making sure it doesn't happen again.
Just installed it, it's funny their landing page is littered with every AI buzzword too. But I am going to give Insomnia a try, I've heard people talk about it and a few others on HN over the years. I just need a glorified cURL GUI at the end of the day.
Yeah it got bought by Kong a while back, and they're definitely not a great company, but the application itself still seems pretty OK.
I really like that you can paste a curl in to setup a new request.
This is definitely the type of app that some AI agent could cobble together pretty quickly, so I don't know why Postman etc thinks they have enough of a moat to keep enshittifying their product.
Lots of discussion about less terrible alternatives to postman. For those already using a Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well. I haven't used it for anything too complicated, but for routine stuff where you need to hit an endpoint and fiddle with the payload and headers it's great.
Wow, the timing is perfect, I was going to post about this. I also found out last night that they actually proxy your requests without your permission. I have setup an exclusion within my firewall for certain request parameters, but it kept getting blocked despite all my settings a though it was going through their server. That really pissed me off since these requests actually contain sensitive data they did not have permission to intercept.
Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).
If there's ever been a perfect app to vibecode your own replacement, it's postman. Claude can knock out a completely usable competitor in under an hour, I'm sure of it. A day of tweaking and you'll have everything you need.
Never liked Postman since they started forcing everyone to signup. Sometimes I hate VCs who unnecessarily funds and ruins a perfectly fine product (of course founders are equally guilty).
I've always kind of thought that Postman was an enshittification story waiting to happen. I've always felt like they prey on people who just aren't comfortable with the command line, and so there isn't much more stooping lower for them than something like this.
Depends. Is it an investment grant or loan? The former is money to grow with no expectations on growth. The latter has an investor giving money in expectation of a return.
Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.
Pretty much. It's just a question of how fast it happens. The more capable something is of making money without compromising the product or exploiting users the longer it will take, but once people who are sick with pathological greed get involved they'll eventually start to demand enshittifying the product and selling out the userbase to squeeze more and more money into their pockets.
It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
> for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.
That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc
We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.
AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
We'll see how it goes.
I miss the UNIX-y movement so much :(
It's not dead??
It’s as dead as rock and roll
You are good at writing. Thanks for this.
Yes, this dude is really good at writing.
I'm already enjoying the second version. I just hope we get to keep it.
Well put, hopefully it's the latter version.
Hoarders can get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.
Join us now and share the software;
You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
-- The Free Software Song, as written and sung by rms
https://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.en.html
Enshittification and private equity are synonymous. Strange that people are still surprised by this.
Perpetual growth at all costs. No idea what's so bad about a mature stable product/company
trying to make money off an invention is perfectly reasonable.
Silently installing hooks into your other tools, to route their traffic through Postman without your knowledge or consent, is not at all reasonable.
People hating you for the damage you cause while making money is also perfectly reasonable.
It’s definitely the best version. I’m seeing so many amazing open source projects since people who once had the vision, but not the coding chops, can now build what they imagine. I myself am building a personal OS that connects to everything and it’s way more fun to build things and use them yourself vs just paying for some other software. Especially when that software can be enshittified or start to squeeze its users like you mentioned.
I'm also seeing people who previously had little interest in coding or understanding systems suddenly become empowered to pump out and deploy unmaintainable trash faster than their peers can resolve the problems they generate.
Can you share any of these many open source projects? I am curious about them.
> AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
I got out of IT partially because I could see the writing on the wall. The "load bearing Excel sheet" is one thing, manageable if you could catch the person who wrote it in time before they depart or die and know your way around Excel - there's only so many ways to achieve a desired goal (unless the author used VBA, at which point all bets are off, and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet).
But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure (i.e. isn't hackable in a few seconds by anyone who manages to compromise some dingus's laptop? Oh hell no. I'm outta there, I'm too old for this crap.
>and I member encountering a spreadsheet that macro-called in a DLL shipped together with the sheet
That sounds absolutely horrifying. I never encountered one of those before thankfully.
Oh it gets better (not the OP but I think the following is even worse).
That DLL hooks into SCADA and sometimes sends updates to a PLC controlling safety critical equipment. When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows. The guy who wrote it died in an (unrelated) industrial accident involving a runaway forklift after leaving the company. Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
sadly this is coming to your linux-distro in no time! Far too many single-dev core building block which are now adding features at breakneck speed conversing with AI only.
> But vibe coded AI bullshit? That is supposed to be hosted by someone and kept secure
It's also astonishingly stupid. I don't want a one-off program for everything. I want a well-designed and battle-tested program that I can extend with AI, and that has a ton of people's AIs directed at it, constantly finding bugs, posting them on the bugtracker, and writing and debating pull requests.
I can't comprehend people who think that everything should be built over and over again, and that that will be safe, practical or cheap. It's like they're telling me that I should design a new language for each conversation that I have. Why would I?
The worst part is how far the capabilities of AI are from that dream anyway. They can't even write readable, intelligible code. They're being celebrated for being able to notice buffer overrun errors in code that people would also notice if anybody had ever really looked at some particular span of code in the last 10 years. It's finding errors in move fast and break things code and code that has been maintained by a weirdo professor in his spare time for free and half the economy somehow relies on. That's not magic, its a sign of how sloppy things got.
Yeah and the issues from these vibecoded one-off programs will be felt for generations.
No, they won't. There's nothing wrong with a vibecoded one-off program, at least not that another vibecoded one-off program can't fix.
Source code is now object code, and vice versa. And AI-written code is more secure than human-written code, not less. Deal with it. We won't be going back.
True or not - this vibe of "deal with it, it's how things are" feels really crummy to me.
There's legitimate concerns and emotions here. No reason to be a dick when discussing it.
Poor judgement call
> Deal with it.
Whenever I spot this shitty cop out here, it is always on a bad take. Never fails.
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
B2B maybe? Usually these businesses thrive solely on flirting with the CTO and getting them to sign a lucrative contract and then mandate internal usage. I'm speaking from experience.
[dead]
Oh THAT'S what they're trying. Doesn't work on me %)
I cannot imagine 1500+ employees "working" on this. Wtf, it's a single person project.
1 developer, 10 managers, 20 C-suite, 1468 sales, 1 barista
All adds up pretty well
And no one to deliver the mail?
surely they have a postman for that
Still sounds much better than Oracle's employee composition!
they are going to annouce layoffs laying of that 1 developer
[flagged]
It's pretty clear they were making a joke.
It's both hilarious and telling that his jest was close enough to reality to provoke you into taking it so seriously.
I love how "1468 sales" was the outrageous part, not "1 developer, 10 managers, 20 C-suite" which came before it.
That just added up to 1500, so maybe the "+" is another manager. No need to be so hasty.
To be fair Postman is a lot more than just a fancy curl client. It's a whole saas platform now.
> It's a whole saas platform now.
I think the argument may be that it doesn't justify this - that the main benefit of the SaaS platform has been to provide 1500+ people with something to do - and that perhaps the SaaS platform doesn't really add enough value to justify its existence or the company's valuation.
I don't really have a point of view on this since I've only used the browser extension (though I don't have it installed at present, thankfully) so the SaaS part of the business might be amazingly useful or it might not: I'm just laying out what I infer the argument in this sub-thread to be.
To be fair, is there a good reason that it should be?
can it send email yet?
Wait till you hear Docusign has 7k employees...
> Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.
All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.
I used to use Postman daily almost ten years ago. Then as my last hurrah before retirement, I took an embedded job that didn't involve me beating on a web API, so I didn't use Postman anymore.
So imagine that I hear about this "Postman" product that involves subscriptions, and AI, and "valued at $X billion" and all this crap, and you can see how I seriously thought that there was another product called "Postman" that wasn't the product I used to use. Turns out...
Someone should vibe-code a VC death clock for developer tools. Enter a company, and it will deduce from its last funding round and headcount the moment it all goes to shit.
In an utlimate twist of irony such a tool could itself pivot to investors because the moment it gets really bad is also the moment to invest in the competition.
I'm not saying that's my strategy with Bugsink, but I'm not saying it isn't either.
It exists: https://saasocalypse.com/scan
"Our models are busy right now. Please retry in a moment."
Hacker News (comment) hug of death? Or victim of its own punchline?
I logged in to postman today after 3 years to use some public API, and god, it was so damn unusable. It took me navigating through "workspace", "environments", etc etc before I could hit the simplest of http endpoints.
For some reason, it is very popular in my country (Costa Rica). Every freelancer I’ve worked with only knows about postman It’s like it was very popular back in the day and people never got the memo there’s better options out there
wrote about this phenomenon: https://nonograph.com/write-some-software-give-it-away-for-f...
Yeah, they managed to land on the IT blacklist for several of our customers.
Nowadays Portman is forbidden for project delivery, unless the customer development team also uses it.
They were valued at $5.6bn in 2021, in the ZIRP boom, and havent raised since. Unlikely they can raise at anything like that now.
> I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
I have no need for it, but there's one company I work with and all of their developers still use it. What do you do/recommend instead?
Not the person you asked, but Bruno <https://www.usebruno.com/> is a good alternative (so far).
https://insomnia.rest/features/api-debugging
or any of these
https://apisyouwonthate.com/blog/http-clients-alternatives-t...
Hey thanks for sharing the APIs You Won't Hate Link! I'm one of the cofounders of the community. I've had a good time with Bruno, personally. Being git-enabled is a big plus.
If you've got other suggestions, I'd love to give them a look!
Insomnia has enshittified over the past few years too, its original author started https://yaak.app/ and it's pretty alright for most of my Postman-relevant use. Not as heavy on automation or API-documentation, but for testing endpoints it's been great.
I use Yaak
I used to use it but then we added Swagger UI to our APIs so now there's no need.
There are loads of alternatives now, I use yaak, but you could just ask an agent to create one for you in 20 minutes
https://hurl.dev/
It seems like cursed(blessed) niche? In search of alternatives couple of years ago, I'm stumbled upon Mockoon which looked really like a single person project. Now, judging by their webpage, I see they are going the same way
> Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
Wtf!! how
A surprising number of developers I work with don't actually know how to use curl. Postman is ubiquitous among that crowd.
That's just GUIs being easier to use than CLIs for most people. After all, that's why Postman got popular - it's a GUI to do curl without the CLI! Or Handbrake to avoid using ffmpeg. Or various "paint" applications to rotate images instead of using imagemagik.
The problem is that Postman decided to want to be a business and took VC money.
10 years ago I totally get that but these days there's plugins built into every IDE that can smooth over the annoyances of testing an API via curl without having to invoke paying for Postman and dealing with all of its nonsense.
Of course now that I said that today I'd probably just have Claude hit the API for me, or build a dashboard to test it, I really don't know how Postman continues to exist.
Postman valued at 5 billon? WTF? I mean the IT industry lives in a fart cloud honestly. I really really think everything is just a little bit overvalued, isn't it?
People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.
> People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.
They should but Bash escaping/encoding is nasty and most terminals have a hard time using the mouse to reliably edit a cURL command, especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output. And it gets oh so tiring when the "copy cURL" command includes about 1000 bytes worth of Cookie headers full of analytics garbage.
That's why Postman became a thing in the first place.
Yes, that's true. You can suffer a lot escaping things out, but is also a valuable lesson! Not promoting those extreme cases, but many many times a few simple curl calls can save your day.
Personally, I replaced Postman years ago with IntelliJ's HTTP client. It is pretty good.
1500+ ppl? :-O
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
I think most people here on HN is within or close by the "Innovators" part of the "Technology adoption life cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle). When Postman hit mainstream, it was already bloated and ruined, and "Innovators" had already moved on to something else, but for Postman that's just the beginning, as they're in the "Early Majority" part, and still have a tail to ride, so investors and everyone else can extract all the value from the remaining s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ users.
Everything will be enshittified, it’s not a question of if but when. The incentives are simple, the stock ticker must go up.
Yes a prime example of enshittification. You attract attention making something humble in scope but good.. but then it is compelled to become something much more. Same story with Coursera imo
> a tiny OSS/passion project like curl
Um.
I was looking to see if someone had posted a reaction to this part, because if no one had, I was going to! I don't disagree with the parent comment at all, but if curl is an example of a tiny project, I'm not sure what could possibly be considered large. It's literally the first example I'd give if asked for an example of an open source utility getting deployed on like, everything in the world.
EDIT: sorry, I was cranky. I just really don't like Postman/its UI/BS. To each his/her own.
Weird take. Just because you can use curl it doesn’t mean you can’t value a GUI to be able to store and manipulate requests quickly and view a formatted response body.
I use postman all the time to explore apis. Sure I could do it from the command line, but this is quicker and it saves my request payloads.
(Though now I’m obviously open to suggestions for better tools)
Get an older copy of fiddler.
Weird take. I thought for myself about the problem and solved it rather than externalize such and end up locked into an increasingly abusive relationship.
Been using homegrown scripts designed around wget and curl, accessible as shell aliases so I save time never downloading Postman or developing muscle memory for it, yet can still explore APIs
There's an idea for a better tool; the one you patch right in to your workflow to avoid context switches to a GUI mental model; I just focus on computer generating data rather than color of the virtual captains chair
Not sure if you’re trolling but writing “homegrown scripts as shell aliases” is not faster than a gui. I totally agree Postman is enshittified, but when I just want to see a sample response for given input data, it does the job. Sure I’d like a more lightweight tool, but there’s no way I’m “context switching” to writing shell scripts when I just want to check a single endpoint. (I’d also wager than in many cases, opening a gui and hitting send on a pre-saved request is faster than using an llm too)
You can do what you like though, my original comment was against the gatekeeping and punching down. I don’t care one way or another what tool you use, but let’s not make people inferior because they aren’t using a TUI for everything.
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This is why the right to fork exists in open source licenses. It’s easier than ever now, too, thanks to LLMs. You might even be able to oneshot forking and removing the malware and rebranding and rebuilding f/oss crapware these days.
I’ve been considering setting up a nonprofit solely to do this and to republish things like Mattermost, Stats, Bitwarden, etc with the corporate antifeatures ripped out.
Bruno. Open source base, runs locally, data remains on your infrastructure.
https://www.usebruno.com/
Bruno is not so dissimilar, unfortunately. See this long thread[1] about their "journey".
[1]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/discussions/269
Yep, this is what I moved to.
Postman has always been proprietary software, hasn't it?
Oh, my mistake! I always assumed it was f/oss that slowly boiled the frog. Turns out it wouldn’t have been in the running for consideration in my daily use stack anyway.
> Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
... what the fuck. Certainly explains things
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore
Yep, one of them. I loved Postman but gone back to plain cURL and the dogshit that is IntelliJ's built-in HTTP request tool.
As for the question... easy. Markets can stay irrational for a very long time...
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I feel the same way about docker. This things just running containers and yet its a billion dollar company.
Who still uses Postman? In my experience it became insanely slow and bloated. Switched to Bruno. IMO, Postman is like uTorrent, everybody heard about it and many install because of inertia.
It's one of those things that have become "enterprise." There's always been better competitors out there, but it was so big, it's the easy choice for companies that are too lazy to do proper/fast vetting.
We went to bruno years ago and has been good. Nice to be able to store the request definitions in git. But to be honest, don't really need any of these tools anymore.
+1 for Bruno, it's simple and great.
They offer a paid version though, so I'm always afraid it's going to enshittify in the future, just like Postman and then Insomnia did.
Working in healthcare, and Postman got decertified by our Cyber team for this. We all switched to Bruno overnight. Their sales team is pinging us like gangbusters though.
A lot of GxP environments had already ditched Postman because it auto-syncs your API schemas to their cloud, as well as values and secrets.
Bruno is fantastic. Switched a while ago and haven't even thought about going back
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.".
I dropped them when they first started forcing you to have an account and from them only used it when work made it mandatory, in some cases we even dropped them for other alternatives (http with source in git, scripts..etc)
I miss the native macOS app Paw
I have been building Kreya [1] for over 6 years now as a Postman alternative. It's offline-first and privacy focused with a storage format made for git.
In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...
[1] https://kreya.app
Postman went from a great lightweight tool to a bloated up-selling mess.
As do all great things once VC sinks its teeth in.
I know I’d also take 400 million in VC funding in hopes of eventually becoming a billionaire.
Vs making tools for donations and no one appreciating it!
If anyone is interested in a Postman alternative but likes TUIs and leans more toward using .http files, check out resterm[0].
btw - I'm the author.
[0]https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm
I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today. The best version of it was just a logger and a formatter on top of an http client. The proto import was nice for gRPC. Who thought that relatively simple tool needed accounts and MCPs and whatever else they've thrown into it?
> I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today.
You can’t have a unicorn valuation built on a simple offline client.
This is basically standard SV play book - first step is „fix“ it to have a cloud component/account. Then store some of the data in cloud only - say for example for team sharing or a „workspace“. Then make some features paid only. Then ramp up the enshitification till metrics show it’s saturated and users will bear no more
I am just going to build my own free little http client (miss the days when postman was just that). Building my own client here - https://github.com/ag3ntsc4rn/librepost Feel free to contribute
Welp, time to vibecode an non cloud version :/
Why do all these tools require a paid account? Bruno specifically says it’s platform-free and stores everything in git.
Bruno has some premium features: https://www.usebruno.com/pricing
I replaced that garbage with Insomnia years back. I’m just waiting until I hear that Insomnia is also a problem and where to go next.
Insomnia 8.0 and above requires an account on their servers to use. The stated reason was that this makes it easier to advertise to you. No thanks.
Older versions are fine, though.
https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/discussions/6590
Bruno is a serviceable replacement that is local first.
Insomnia _has_ a problem, since it forces you to create a cloud account with them.
Bruno [1] is the current better alternative to Insomnia.
[1] https://www.usebruno.com/
My path was: Postman -> Turns into shit -> Insomnia -> Turns into shit -> Bruno.. let's hope Bruno doesn't turn into shit.
These days I would just vibe my own. There's nothing special about any of these software.
I've been using Insomnia whenever I can since before Covid. Its been nice, but ever since they started pushing accounts so aggressively, I've switched to Yaak to get back to that feel of a simple API client that prompted me to switch to Insomia in the first place. 100% recommend. https://yaak.app/
That looks appealing but the existence of a Pricing page tells me it's just a matter of time.
I have a sense that a dumb Web API testing UI application is really not that hard to get AI to implement. These apps all look about the same for a reason. So maybe there will be a prevailing FOSS option that isn't trying to monetize.
Yaak creator here! The commercial-use license is my best attempt at aligning incentives between me and the user, while still funding the project's future.
FYI the license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run from source for any use (including commercial), for free.
Happy to answer any questions as well.
Hey! I respect your desire to monetize. And I appreciate that you're trying to make it work through monetizing the commercial side. I think that's a sensible approach.
I'm for the most part just jaded about it all because I've seen Postman and Insomnia slowly boil the frog with increased pushiness towards logins and monetization. If a project is trying to make money at all, I feel it will inevitably grapple with the same issues. Especially for the kind of product where we can have five different options for in the comments section already. But I hope you do succeed in maintaining an honourable revenue stream.
> If a project is trying to make money at all
long-time engineer here, begging others to reconsider this attitude. Engineering work has value, engineers deserve to be paid for their time, and the community will have better software if engineers are able to get paid for their time.
Is there another profession where charging a fair price for a product is looked on with derision the way it is with software?
Oh don't get me wrong. I have gotten my company to pay for a lot of good FOSS and services, especially from teams of 1. There just has to be honest value-add potential.
Yep! Fun fact, I made Insomnia too, and started over with Yaak after I sold it and watched it go down the same path. Yaak was my attempt at making sure it doesn't happen again.
Just installed it, it's funny their landing page is littered with every AI buzzword too. But I am going to give Insomnia a try, I've heard people talk about it and a few others on HN over the years. I just need a glorified cURL GUI at the end of the day.
I use Bruno. I forget what Insomnia did that irritated me, but Bruno is the closest I've found to a dumb client that doesn't pester me for an account.
Yeah it got bought by Kong a while back, and they're definitely not a great company, but the application itself still seems pretty OK.
I really like that you can paste a curl in to setup a new request.
This is definitely the type of app that some AI agent could cobble together pretty quickly, so I don't know why Postman etc thinks they have enough of a moat to keep enshittifying their product.
Lots of discussion about less terrible alternatives to postman. For those already using a Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well. I haven't used it for anything too complicated, but for routine stuff where you need to hit an endpoint and fiddle with the payload and headers it's great.
The JetBrains IDE, Visual Studio, and VS Code all support http files as well, which can be checked into an application.
The REST Client for VS Code is pretty good; I’ve been using it for a few years now.
Wow, the timing is perfect, I was going to post about this. I also found out last night that they actually proxy your requests without your permission. I have setup an exclusion within my firewall for certain request parameters, but it kept getting blocked despite all my settings a though it was going through their server. That really pissed me off since these requests actually contain sensitive data they did not have permission to intercept.
Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).
It was never, ever clear to me why you needed to use Postman instead of Curl
Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.
If there's ever been a perfect app to vibecode your own replacement, it's postman. Claude can knock out a completely usable competitor in under an hour, I'm sure of it. A day of tweaking and you'll have everything you need.
I really don't see the point of Postman. It used to be light and efficient, now it's bloated and inefficient
We are in the new era of provider malware. GREEEAAAAT! Thanks AI!
Postman was amazing 6-8 years ago. What a downfall it’s been.
Would you be willing to pay for a local only postman alternative if it was built by hand and native (no electron)?
People are paying for Bruno, and probably wishing it would load near instantly (no electron), so there's like a market.
We left Postman long time ago and only use Bruno.
I haven’t used postman for years and I don’t know why anyone would. Are people really paying for it?
This is their very bad attempt to survive , who need this in the age of agents ?
Curl Web Interface shouldn't require any payment at all
Use impostman.el/verb.el/restclient.el in Emacs.
If even half of that is true then they’re cooked
If there ever was a tool that could be vibe coded, a postman-like is the one.
Never liked Postman since they started forcing everyone to signup. Sometimes I hate VCs who unnecessarily funds and ruins a perfectly fine product (of course founders are equally guilty).
Postman went from a nice tool to an almost virus in just a few years. It's crazy that anyone still uses it.
I'm currently using Bruno (https://www.usebruno.com/)
They have an open format for API collections: https://www.opencollection.com/
I made the switch to Bruno years ago after getting hounded by Postman’s sales team and Insomnia started requiring an account.
Works well enough without getting in my way.
Does anyone know if Bruno is not on the same path as Postman?
They have a "Pricing" page, so it's a matter of time before it enshittifies. But it's still nice as of now.
Switched to Bruno myself, and moved my team to it last year as well. Vast improvement over late stage Postman.
At least it has never been easier to transition to another tool or to make your own.
Thank god we moved to Bruno and sometimes just http files in vs code or jetbrains
Thanks, I still use Postman out of muscle memory. Will use Bruno or Insomnia (as recommended here)
This happened to me. Holy fuck I was pissed
Part of Postman's ongoing enshittification...
Unsurprising. I loved the tool but it was obviously time to drop it when they began pushing for logins.
Thank you for the reminder, I had not deleted Postman yet. Done :D
Enshittification wins again. :(
I've always kind of thought that Postman was an enshittification story waiting to happen. I've always felt like they prey on people who just aren't comfortable with the command line, and so there isn't much more stooping lower for them than something like this.
Does everything have to go to shit when money is involved?
No. Postman sells nothing of value.
At this point I do not see why the entirety of their software could not be a one shot prompt for the price of deer nuts.
> price of deer nuts
Which, in case others didn't know, are under a buck.
Depends. Is it an investment grant or loan? The former is money to grow with no expectations on growth. The latter has an investor giving money in expectation of a return.
Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.
Pretty much. It's just a question of how fast it happens. The more capable something is of making money without compromising the product or exploiting users the longer it will take, but once people who are sick with pathological greed get involved they'll eventually start to demand enshittifying the product and selling out the userbase to squeeze more and more money into their pockets.
Until we stop relying on SV as the standard-bearer for tech culture? Absolutely.
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who the hell needs that. skills are just md files
Or pre-AI it was a python script inside a notebook.