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.
> 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 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.
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.
I agree that I don't know a single competent developer who uses it, BUT, it's so extremely common to hear from very barely technical people that they'll use Postman to test an API... (and/or they'll complain about an API being hard to use because Postman is confusing them, because it's so bad).
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)
curl is used absolutely everywhere, and yet the donations that flow through Open Collective come to ~90k - https://opencollective.com/curl#category-BUDGET . Afaik, the lead developer is paid by an employer, not by the project.
Between two very different paths - struggle & support the world's infra as a 1-2 person project, while dealing with AI CVEs and infinite expectations... OR enshittify ... I mean they're two not great outcomes.
I'd also rather be/become curl, but yeah. This is the real nightmare software monetization power law distribution.
Postman valued at 5 billon? WTF? I mean the IT industry lives in 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. 10 managers for 1468 sales is a deranged statement.
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.
> 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 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.
[delayed]
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.
I agree that I don't know a single competent developer who uses it, BUT, it's so extremely common to hear from very barely technical people that they'll use Postman to test an API... (and/or they'll complain about an API being hard to use because Postman is confusing them, because it's so bad).
It's a pretty reliable (in)competence shibboleth.
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)
wrote about this phenomenon: https://nonograph.com/write-some-software-give-it-away-for-f...
curl is used absolutely everywhere, and yet the donations that flow through Open Collective come to ~90k - https://opencollective.com/curl#category-BUDGET . Afaik, the lead developer is paid by an employer, not by the project.
Between two very different paths - struggle & support the world's infra as a 1-2 person project, while dealing with AI CVEs and infinite expectations... OR enshittify ... I mean they're two not great outcomes.
I'd also rather be/become curl, but yeah. This is the real nightmare software monetization power law distribution.
Postman valued at 5 billon? WTF? I mean the IT industry lives in 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.
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 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.
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/
Yep, this is what I moved to.
Postman has always been proprietary software, hasn't it?
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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.
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.
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.
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!
I haven’t used postman for years and I don’t know why anyone would. Are people really paying for it?
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?
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.
Postman was amazing 6-8 years ago. What a downfall it’s been.
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.
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.
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.
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
Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.
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).
I really don't see the point of Postman. It used to be light and efficient, now it's bloated and inefficient
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.
Switched to Bruno myself, and moved my team to it last year as well. Vast improvement over late stage Postman.
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.
Thank god we moved to Bruno and sometimes just http files in vs code or jetbrains
Unsurprising. I loved the tool but it was obviously time to drop it when they began pushing for logins.
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.
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.
who the hell needs that. skills are just md files
Or pre-AI it was a python script inside a notebook.
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