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.
Yeah. The plucky rebels pretty much won against the evil empire, but the forces of darkness weren't completely beaten. They regrouped and then repurposed the rebels tools against them. The might of venture capital, big tech, SaaS, hyperscalers and AI was too much. The rebels weren't decisively beaten so much as eventually eroded out of any real significance.
MIT and other non copy left licenses were a mistake. In the 2000s and 2010s people were so concerned with usage and GitHub stars of their OSS that they just gave everything away to corporations and now don't have the right to complain anymore.
Like, what? Solaris/SunOS, DEC Ultrix/Tru64, AIX, HP-UX, Xenix, etc., all with big bad monopolist AT&T's UNIX as their grandpappy. UNIX was corporate to the hilt.
Corporate, sure, but painting DEC, (old) HP, and Sun with the same brush as AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft just because they sold proprietary, but generally well-documented and reliable hardware and software at whatever prices the market would bear seems unfair.
Articulate and well spoken - I hope that through threads like these that especially tech newcomers discover that there are alternatives to the YC founder mentality of "growth at all costs". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway? Build something that respects your users and you can see yourself working on for 30 years, living comfortably and in moderation.
A minor tweak to The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman[1]:
The venture capitalist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”
>". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway?
Well, living on the other side of the pond: I get shuffled around and laid off every few years in the game industry and any savings I had got obliterated surviving in this not-recession as everyone around me gaslights me into telling me that "the economy is fine", while doing regular layoffs in nearly all sectors. And it's not like I have some sort of high respect for my craft by those who enjoy it either.
There's definitely a temptation to just sell out, find a huge buyout, and get out of the rat race so I can tinker to my heart's content on stuff I want to make. Not what "sells" or what some director wanted after 20 filters of HR, "focus groups, and other sales people get their hands on it. What integrity am I truly keeping in the former situation?
Of course, all this assumes I have the opportunity to sell out. Someone at that point is more than likely someone who was already in a trajectory to defy the typical 9-5 40 hour grind to begin with.
It’s basically wondering why your sales aren’t going up when there are still customers to be found. Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die, so one would assume you grow or fade, unless customers just like… stop buying things in a category for some reason (maybe a superior category was invented?)
The problem isn’t infinite growth in a still-growing world, it’s exactly what you posted here: Growth at all costs. The pendulum has swung too hard in favor of growth over stability. This is great for shareholders (read:everyone in America who wants to realistically retire one day) but bad for workers (read: everyone in America, regardless of whether or not they want to retire one day).
Late-stage capitalism is addicted to ever-increasing quantities of money.
It'd be nice to imagine our society surviving our ruling classes' addiction, but I would not bet on that.
(You might read some essays by recovered addicts to get a sense of the monomania of it, and why they wouldn't about things like "mature" and "stable".)
Capitalism is a system that needs to be controlled. Setting the kitchen on fire is not late stage food preparation. Crashing a car because you drove fast on bald tires is not late stage vehicular mobility.
Enshittification and capitalism are synonymous. There's no other magical form of equity that's any better. Steam's an oft cited counterexample but Steam is in enshittification stage 2 (once you have the users, be good to vendors to develop total platform lock-in).
> 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 ($$$).
That's even worse than the time I was on a conference call with the COO of a Fortune 500 retailer who referred to "the Excel spreadsheet we use to keep track of the stores we own".
The subject matter was building an auditing system to comply with the requirements of an IRS consent decree as part of a settlement for shoddy accounting practices which may or may not have included tracking billions of dollars of assets with Excel.
> Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
I'm guessing the fundamental reason debugging would require that isn't something an AI could get around. My guess is the LLM would immediately disregard whatever instructions you gave it not to cause having to replace all the crucibles, then say "Oops! You're right." when you point out that you asked it not to do that.
Hmmm, but shouldn't there be some way to just make a copy of the file, put in a container and tell the AI, scan the environment, do nothing except watch what the excel sheet does and record it, then determine how to create an identical sandbox containing the same outputs and feedback. Then see if the sheet works in that sandbox. If it does, then debug it until you get identical behavior out of a new program. Then have a week/month of dry runs just copying the inputs from the real world to it and capturing its output to compare to the dll. Do that for long enough and you should have a drag and drop solution right?
I'm not saying it's easy, or worth anyone's time, but it should be possible right?
Thankfully we are finally after all these years getting regulation on that sort of stuff. It seems EU was 20 something years late... And no I really think that regulation in case like this is really reasonable idea.
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.
Because IT/programmers/tech folks in general have abdicated their responsibilities for too long, imo. The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.
The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.
Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.
If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.
It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.
This sounds exactly like the promises of putting a PC on everyone's desktop rather than a terminal connected to a locked-down mainframe, which in the end led to the lockdown migrating to PCs and the few employees who had any interest in automation forced to use tools like Excel because it was at least an improvement over VBScript and batch files and IT wouldn't let them install legit development tools unless their job description required them.
What are the odds that the average corporate IT department is going to allow the use of anything other than locked-down corporate AI with strict token quotas and stricter acceptable use policies?
Because we don't have that special sort of brain that thinks turning such a simple useful tool into a commercial behemoth is a good idea? I doubt anyone there really things there is a useful purpose to it all, but they have to keep it in motion to keep their pay coming in.
Yes but they’re clearly not all equal. Not everyone is a “hater” for thinking that basically installing malware to make money is bad.
There are legitimate, ethical ways to make money, and then not so ethical ones. It seems for tech companies, they often can’t find the ethical ways or they simply don’t produce enough money, and so they feel forced to act unethically.
The only reason they get away with it is… well everyone is doing it. It’s a culture problem, and it’s viral to the entire tech economy. Nobody cares about being scummy, doing things behind users backs, invading their privacy, employing dark patterns, or even leaking highly sensitive data.
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.
Suit yourself. Always diamonds in the rough and you can check repos I star on Github.
I built software to manage my own e-commerce business before AI coding existed but see teenagers I mentor vibe code applications that are actually helping them make money. They are 5-7 years ahead of where I was at their age and I started the e-commerce business in college.
And these people are making software for themselves and opensourcing it. So what are you on about peers resolving problems?
One effect doesn't exclude the other. I'm talking about people creating more problems than they are solving because they lack a fundamental understanding of how their systems, and the generated code that acts upon them, actually work. They're enamored with the ease and alacrity with which they can generate code but unwittingly leave a host of issues to be cleaned up. It's usually other people who discover the problems because these suddenly productive "authors" didn't have the know-how and awareness to create exacting enough prompts or sufficiently iterate on the generated output.
It's a phenomenon I've observed which doesn't necessarily take away from the benefits you've found. But maybe it's worth some consideration that this shift in empowerment isn't without negative consequences.
Have you built something you actually use? The feedback loop is immediate. You tell Claude and it goes it and fixes it.
You realize mostly proprietary software is made by people that haven’t even worked in that niche? Now people in that niche with these immediate loop can make software work way better and faster. Without the risk of it getting worse over time or selling out it a PE firm like Bending Spoons.
Not if you reach for something open-source and use that as the starting point. Most B2B customers are small businesses and once they build bespoke software that works with their business, they won’t need loads of tokens to keep it running.
It’s by Vercel Labs, but it’s a small team and it’s basically a small website builder and even comes with 5 free prompts. I’m building on it to build a universal storefront
Someone who got early access to Fable 5.5 asked it to make an anime style video using html and it’s amazing. I might make a short film doing this one 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
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 worked at a company where postman was (incorrectly) set up, used by everyone in the company, including non-devs and the ops team to make API requests instead of letting us develop tooling... Everyone hated it, but the company kept paying for it.
Hell, our CI test suite ran Postman, but because that was badly set up if a test suite failed, it required manually editing some state, otherwise the Postman state got fucked and everything would fail.
Did we still continue paying for it, you might wonder? Yes, of course we did.
Probably. They’ve been sending a lot of emails with creepy hyper-personalized AI-generated marketing material, trying to get us on an Enterprise contract. Things like slideshows that have the names and profile pictures of my colleagues who use Postman. Very weird.
This seems to be a trend now. I guess the dumbification is already started because I can't imagine a sane marketing person thinking this would generate positive leads. Unless they are targeting the same dumbified people.
Well with a proverbial lawnmower at the top of the org chart, how many sets of weed-whackers, pruning shears, leafblowers, and RoundUp dispensers are below it?!
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.
If they can charge for it, why not? Search is an important part of mail for many users, so there is some cross-over in knowledge/experience that can be leveraged.
And assuming you mean Google, the question is based on a false premise. They were an advertising company years before gmail was introduced, and an ad-tech company being able to trawl your mail to find ways to advertise at you is a very different proposition to a search company releasing the same product.
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.
Ah thanks for name dropping Bruno. I actually never found the Postman alternative I was looking for. Using wget is fine. It would be nice to have an interface with collections again. Will check out Bruno this weekend…
Exactly. Back in 2015 when I was still coding professionally Postman was our go-to tool for API testing.
Earlier this year I reached for Postman when kicking off a side project. I was appalled by how convoluted it has become. It really is a Frankenstein product. And they can’t seem to figure out what their offer really is.
No thanks. RIP to the OG Postman. The new Postman is dead to me.
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'm not sure why I'd trust a site that gives OpenAI and example.com equal marks as "already dead" because they're "vulnerable [...] to AI-native replacement" for anything but a laugh.
Because, current valuations are completely detached from any operational or market realities that affect a company. The metric has become the goal, and the metric is controlled by nontechnical people that have no intuitive understanding of how technical products are used. Even worse, they’ve all gone though a vibe coding tutorial and now either believe they have real technical depth, or believe that it doesn’t matter.
Technical is subordinate to business and always has been (apart from a bunch of last century hackers with university tenure). If business no longer thinks it can make money with human developers, they'll be laid off. It doesn't matter whether the product is better or worse.
That’s business administration, which has nothing to do with the valuation process, anymore. A company could be run by some trust fund kid with no understanding of business that hired a full-time department of 10 people to repaint the lines in the parking lot every day, but if their story was impressive enough, their valuation could be astronomical. It’s all about vibes (in SV, at least.)
> 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...
I haven’t met anyone using MongoDB in what feels like 12 years, but it’s a $26B company.
There’s apparently a surprisingly profitable enterprise afterlife to developer tools that manage to become popular in the right moment, even if the moment is fairly short.
Databases are extremely sticky because migrating can be a nightmare. Postman seems like it would be much less sticky, you can just import your Postman collection to Bruno and it's pretty much a drop-in replacement.
If history has taught us anything, it's that there's at least a limited-time market for inferior GUI alternatives to nearly anything you can easily do from a command-line. Though to be fair, there's plenty of room for value-add over curl for web requests in terms of presentation where GUIs can work well: asset viewers, syntax highlighting, pretty printing, code folding, etc., especially if combined with interactive tools for decoding and deobfuscation that feed back into the viewer.
The obvious AI integration is reverse engineering tools, assuming the trend towards locking such things down doesn't continue.
And honestly, I worry less about people paying $29 for a GUI file renaming tool than I do about the same people copy/pasting LLM-generated shell snippets, given that LLMs will inevitably have trained on the existing corpus of shell scripts, many if not most of which contain potentially dangerous bugs, especially when used outside their intended context of known-trustworthy input.
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 wrote a lot of python. Whenever I was working with an API, I'd just spin up a jupyter notebook and write out the calls I wanted to try out in a python notebook, once I had everything working, it was just a copy paste job into the codebase.
Using some kind of dedicated tool like postman always felt like a literal step backwards.
I know lot of bits with curl. But I find it always a pain to use. Fine for when you do scripting but I find command line pretty painful overall. So I understand want to use some other tool with better ergonomics.
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.
>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.
The good thing is that now takes about 2 days to replicate with an agent the parts that matter from their whole offering and tell them to go f themselves.
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
We're using Postman at work (I think we have a subscription for 10 or 20 users), mostly when doing REST development and to share the API calls between people. Though I rarely have to use it so each time I'm so confused of between the collections, environment, vaults, variables...
Also if you have an alternative that's easier to use, I'm interested
They chased B2B revenue too hard, my work built internal alt in a few days that fits more appropriately with our orgs usecases earlier this year, Sad lol
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.
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!
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
My IDE has always been for a lot more than coding, so even though most of the coding is now done in a terminal by an AI agent, I still spend many hours everyday in my IDE.
There are a couple of open source alternatives (though at least some of those have tried to go the way of Postman to some extent), just using curl directly, or we've rolled our own wrappers (personally, or team- or company-wide) for our specific use cases.
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.
I know right? I would think even $5M would be excessive. It’s interesting that with AI now anyone can throw something together like that within a few days. Investors are probably squeezing them pretty hard to get their returns back before anyone and their uncle can create their own postman.
> 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.
> and most terminals have a hard time using the mouse to reliably edit a cURL command
This is true. Even though I'm not much of a mouse user for it, I tend to edit curl commands of much length in a text editor when I'm doing things by hand, then pasting into the terminal.
> especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output
Or if your prompt outputs something to stderr instead of stdout so it doesn't get counted when the shell is trying to position where you are in editing the stream. Ubuntu's default prompt under byobu is a pain for this when I move to a different machine and forget to carry my tweaks for that.
For the missing final \n I just hit [enter] an extra time, but getting round the stderr thing isn't quite that simple.
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.
Sales called me a couple weeks ago. I told them Postman had a bad reputation among developers and I wouldn’t be using it. The salesperson was just absolutely incredulous that anyone could feel this way. It was pretty funny. Maybe they’re drinking their own Kool Aid.
When was the last time you heard about a VC-backed company going out of business? They either go unicorn or they get frozen until another VC-funded company is large enough to absorb them and quietly absorb their lack of value. Postman is a big morsel but I guarantee some company is being lined up just perfectly to consume them.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Postman logs detailed information on every single API request you make through its tool, including query parameters. If you use the templating syntax `{{some_secret}}` to fill in a query parameter, it sends the actual secret content of `some_secret` to Postman's servers. If you disable outgoing network traffic to this logging endpoint, the entire app will stop working properly.
I discovered this when investigating whether Postman is HIPAA-compliant (it is not).
I am still dumbfounded what value Postman can make in capturing all the publics usage. Sure they could mine the data, but they cant exactly use it in any legal way so why bother ?
My main point was that I wouldn't want my secrets to ever be sent to Postman under any circumstance (or alternately, stop calling them "secret"). A lot of the online responses were some variation of "why are you sending secrets in query parameters in the first place?" (I'm not). When I posted on Reddit, it escalated to targeted harassment by people who were obviously current/former employees at Postman.
I did send out an email blast to a bunch of CIOs/CSOs in my network which went a bit "email viral" through forwarding, and this ended up triggering a substantial amount of enterprise cancellations.
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.
Mostly enterprise teams and intermediate devs from my experience. I lead the API platform for a popular e-signature company, and a postman collection is the first thing devs ask for. Even when we point them to our docs, they'd rather just import a collection and start hitting endpoints immediately.
Haven't heard of Bruno until now. Looks like a solid offline-first tool. I don't see a public collection or web runner, and it looks like it supports GitHub-based sharing. Postman on the other hand, their public API network (or whatever they call it) along with the web runner reduce a lot of friction for API vendors like us and for dev teams who just want to quickly play with the API in the browser, especially during their evaluation stage.
bruno is really great used it for a while but the 5 API syncs a month on the free tier is a pain, had to switch to Apidog never been so happy with unlimited syncs
Use to work at one org in a bloated financial company that was paying Postman nearly $40,000 a month for a license provided to every person in the org. Regardless if they were a dev or not. I suspect the sales pitch pushes for unnecessary licenses because out of around 500 employees in the org, only 80 were developers and out of those 80 only one single team used postman. So this one org was overpaying by nearly >95%, doubt this org is truly unique regarding this.
I suspect that nearly every single public corporation are likely overpaying for software products, it's a waste of capital and extremely inefficient. All it shows is that corporations are too loose with their money and can probably deserve to get their tax obligations increased by a good 20-40% if they're this okay with wasting it.
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.
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.
FWIW Bruno can be forked unlike Postman. Not to mention, it would be trivial to vibe code something like this now. Postman absolutely deserves its downfall for trying to nickel and dime customers.
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.
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...
Mad respect.
Kreya is my go-to for playing GRPC endpoints. Basically every other tool has some whacky behaviour, got rapidly abandoned, or had janky ux.
It's so hard to see this happen. I worked for postman for 4 years, and it was a great place to work for a long time. I've also seen how the industry has changed.
As agents start to write all the code, API platforms need to adapt to the new user. That means a complete rethink about how to approach API development.
It's why I'm building Sannr, an API platform built for coding agents.
When API calls go through our client, we capture it and turn it into API context that lives right next to the API code in the repo. Future coding agents have access to the API context and don't have to relearn API lessons again.
The API client is lightweight, lives on your machine, not in someone else's cloud.
Sannr is also open source, so you can see the code.
Is someone who has $100k reasonable for wanting $1M? Sure, one would struggle to buy a nice house with only $100k. With $1M it is much easier.
Do you think someone who has only $100, whose only thought is how to pay for their next meal or rent check, might similarly wonder “what difference is there between $100k and $1M? They’re both very rich!”
Point is, ambition is like a gas, it tends to expand to the volume of its container. With $400M you have enough for your own and your family’s comfort forever. With $4B it’s less about lifestyle and more about shaping the world to your liking. You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting.
+1 for Yaak, I've used it for over a year for work and personal projects. It is stable and fast (also the dev behind it has the first name as me, so I'm a bit biased towards other Gregs!).
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
Postman was my curl with a gui. Used it everywhere, recommended it everywhere. But one day out of the blue it asks me to login, and it all went downhill from there. Imagine you had to login to use curl?
Anyway, I'm sure somewhere in some terms and conditions I agreed to, it says "we own the glass".
If you're a backend dev writing an API you should be writing automated tests. Clicking around in a GUI app is not the correct way to do things.
If you're exploring someone else's API there are lots of other clients you can use. Resonance seems pretty solid to me. Don't get what's the point of all the extra faff in Postman.
If you want to get real basic there's always ol' reliable curl.
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 much prefer the approach of being able to use the browser for things like this. It feels much more lightweight than installing a piece of desktop 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.
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.
When they started uploading things to the server and requiring you to have an account to access the things that they STOLE from your machine without authorization in first place, I uninstall it...
What can go wrong by uploading your things, if you had any passwords or users there that "pinky promise" will not be uploaded, then running AI and maybe oops have a leak and now someone is hitting your production servers?
Yes, this is very bad. I've alerted my team and we'll be deprecating its use immediately. Hopefully procurement can get refunds on the licenses we purchased not that long ago. Something tells me Postman is going to regret violating people's trust - the moat isn't so large that people must endure unethical, if not illegal, behavior like this.
Many, many years ago, I used Postman for the first time, way back when it was a Chrome plugin. As an iOS dev, it was amazing to be able to validate the requests I needed to make outside the context of my code to validate things worked. Until, one day, I wasn't seeing something iterate in the responses I was getting as I expected to. Many cmd+R presses later, I talked to the API team to check logs, and we found that Postman was caching what should have been independent requests. Easily blamed on Chrome at the time, but it was an undocumented and unexpected behavior by Postman, who really should have better handled making each request unique.
I didn't need another reason not to use Postman, but I'll take it. Shame on them for moving in shadows.
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.
Been some years since I had to use it (and I think my company jettisoned it shortly thereafter), but at its peak, I remember it doing some things really well that were a PITA to setup locally in a terminal with cURL.
The biggest "Oh my god, this is so much easier" moment was just setting up a tiny JS script onto the login API to stash the bearer token from the return response into a variable, and then propagate it into the header of all subsequent calls. Trying to script THAT in Bash (parsing the bearer token from the return response) was also a headache and never worked 100% for me.
Although that was me trying to do it manually. I'm sure a vibe-coded solution would probably work well enough these days.
I think because editing in terminals text was not a good development experience, navigating the curdor, and pressing Enter would issue the command.
Personally I use a wrapper cli I built myself over curl which automatically gets api docs of my product and easily get the token so its great for agents
As a .NET developer I had been using LinqPad for years, and just kept a set of template scripts for the various rote web-call scripts I might need to do e.x. XML or JSON, Auth handling, etc.
(For the non .NET folks, LinqPad is a simple application that lets you write small script-esque bits of C#/F#/VB.NET and has a wonderful little `.Dump()` method that can pretty-print just about any object to it's output window, and even export that output window to Excel/HTML which is nice for some tasks.)
Switched to intellij http scratches ages ago. Then go curl. I remember a bunch of people using postman from a decade to a few years ago. It's been a while since I've seen anyone. Probably people who do it rarely but haven't taken the time to change tools.
postman has been malware since the day they added accounts many years ago. luckily only low skill cli fearing developers mostly gravitated to it, esp anytime in the past decade
Postman management is something else. I remember a few years ago, once they had that VC money, they made it so you had to log/pushed you to. funny, considering it's basically a GUI for curl and then they spent a ton of money on some party with famous singers or something.
"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)
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).
At this point, with coding agents, it would be stupid to waste time with Postman. I already uninstalled it after using it for over a decade. Build your own simple tools for debugging, my friends. The old archaic era is over.
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.
The last time I opened postman was last year. Now, almost all my projects have templated curls with request-response signatures documented in API.md file per project. Works like a charm.
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.
Well, somehow the society has gone for the better over the course of history, even with pathologically greedy and evil people constantly in positions of power, so that counts as something.
For the better in spite of the pathologically greedy and evil, but not because of them. A lot of blood has been shed keeping them in check throughout the ages and only recently have they been allowed to feed off of the masses without any real fear. They just hold us back by draining us, stamping out competitors who drive innovation, and funneling everything into their own pockets.
How are people still using Postman? You can vibecode Postman in like 30 minutes.
Do you even need it at all now? You can just ask the AI to write you a test suite in 5 minutes which calls all your endpoints with all the parameters and assertions you could possibly want. It's way more flexible than Postman and it's just a text file/script; you can share with any team member.
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 :(
Yeah. The plucky rebels pretty much won against the evil empire, but the forces of darkness weren't completely beaten. They regrouped and then repurposed the rebels tools against them. The might of venture capital, big tech, SaaS, hyperscalers and AI was too much. The rebels weren't decisively beaten so much as eventually eroded out of any real significance.
It helps that the rebels donated copies of all their equipment to the dark forces.
MIT and other non copy left licenses were a mistake. In the 2000s and 2010s people were so concerned with usage and GitHub stars of their OSS that they just gave everything away to corporations and now don't have the right to complain anymore.
Like, what? Solaris/SunOS, DEC Ultrix/Tru64, AIX, HP-UX, Xenix, etc., all with big bad monopolist AT&T's UNIX as their grandpappy. UNIX was corporate to the hilt.
Corporate, sure, but painting DEC, (old) HP, and Sun with the same brush as AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft just because they sold proprietary, but generally well-documented and reliable hardware and software at whatever prices the market would bear seems unfair.
It's not dead??
It’s as dead as rock and roll
but the heart of GNU is still beating!
Rock vive no muere
UNIX is, UNIX-y stuff isn't.
You are good at writing. Thanks for this.
Agree... I scrolled back up from the last of the comments just to say this.
Yes, this dude is really good at writing.
Very well written reply that voices something I knew but couldn’t quite articulate.
Articulate and well spoken - I hope that through threads like these that especially tech newcomers discover that there are alternatives to the YC founder mentality of "growth at all costs". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway? Build something that respects your users and you can see yourself working on for 30 years, living comfortably and in moderation.
A minor tweak to The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman[1]:
The venture capitalist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
[1] https://aliabdaal.com/newsletter/the-parable-of-the-mexican-...
>". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway?
Well, living on the other side of the pond: I get shuffled around and laid off every few years in the game industry and any savings I had got obliterated surviving in this not-recession as everyone around me gaslights me into telling me that "the economy is fine", while doing regular layoffs in nearly all sectors. And it's not like I have some sort of high respect for my craft by those who enjoy it either.
There's definitely a temptation to just sell out, find a huge buyout, and get out of the rat race so I can tinker to my heart's content on stuff I want to make. Not what "sells" or what some director wanted after 20 filters of HR, "focus groups, and other sales people get their hands on it. What integrity am I truly keeping in the former situation?
Of course, all this assumes I have the opportunity to sell out. Someone at that point is more than likely someone who was already in a trajectory to defy the typical 9-5 40 hour grind to begin with.
I'm already enjoying the second version. I just hope we get to keep it.
Well put, hopefully it's the latter version.
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
It’s basically wondering why your sales aren’t going up when there are still customers to be found. Even if you saturate a market, new people are born every day, at a greater rate than they die, so one would assume you grow or fade, unless customers just like… stop buying things in a category for some reason (maybe a superior category was invented?)
The problem isn’t infinite growth in a still-growing world, it’s exactly what you posted here: Growth at all costs. The pendulum has swung too hard in favor of growth over stability. This is great for shareholders (read:everyone in America who wants to realistically retire one day) but bad for workers (read: everyone in America, regardless of whether or not they want to retire one day).
Growth will stop when nobody can buy.
Late-stage capitalism is addicted to ever-increasing quantities of money.
It'd be nice to imagine our society surviving our ruling classes' addiction, but I would not bet on that.
(You might read some essays by recovered addicts to get a sense of the monomania of it, and why they wouldn't about things like "mature" and "stable".)
Capitalism is a system that needs to be controlled. Setting the kitchen on fire is not late stage food preparation. Crashing a car because you drove fast on bald tires is not late stage vehicular mobility.
I don't think Postman has any PE connections.
Wikipedia states Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital
Enshittification and capitalism are synonymous. There's no other magical form of equity that's any better. Steam's an oft cited counterexample but Steam is in enshittification stage 2 (once you have the users, be good to vendors to develop total platform lock-in).
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
While I agree with every word of this I never want to hear RMS sing this again.
You won't be free though, you'll be living under a bridge if you don't get paid. The original free software movers had tenure.
> 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 ($$$).
That's even worse than the time I was on a conference call with the COO of a Fortune 500 retailer who referred to "the Excel spreadsheet we use to keep track of the stores we own".
The subject matter was building an auditing system to comply with the requirements of an IRS consent decree as part of a settlement for shoddy accounting practices which may or may not have included tracking billions of dollars of assets with Excel.
> When does it send updates versus just query the controller? No one knows.
Ask an LLM to reverse engineer it and explain it.
They said this:
> Even so much as debugging it would require shutting down the entire factory and replacing all the crucibles afterwards ($$$).
I'm guessing the fundamental reason debugging would require that isn't something an AI could get around. My guess is the LLM would immediately disregard whatever instructions you gave it not to cause having to replace all the crucibles, then say "Oops! You're right." when you point out that you asked it not to do that.
Hmmm, but shouldn't there be some way to just make a copy of the file, put in a container and tell the AI, scan the environment, do nothing except watch what the excel sheet does and record it, then determine how to create an identical sandbox containing the same outputs and feedback. Then see if the sheet works in that sandbox. If it does, then debug it until you get identical behavior out of a new program. Then have a week/month of dry runs just copying the inputs from the real world to it and capturing its output to compare to the dll. Do that for long enough and you should have a drag and drop solution right?
I'm not saying it's easy, or worth anyone's time, but it should be possible right?
Thankfully we are finally after all these years getting regulation on that sort of stuff. It seems EU was 20 something years late... And no I really think that regulation in case like this is really reasonable idea.
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.
Because IT/programmers/tech folks in general have abdicated their responsibilities for too long, imo. The industry collectively started huffing their own farts and forgot they operate in a support role for most organizations.
The state of IT has been stagnant at best for the past 20-30 odd years. The promises of the 90's or earlier that we were going to have average office workers being able to automate their workflows never was realized.
Today with AI I'm watching random sales people automate a large portion of the bullshit part of their jobs IT and technology systems foisted upon them for no real reason. Those CRM systems that force you to click 28 buttons per lead you enter into the system, with all sorts of amazing UIx like having to restart from scratch if you miss a field, get logged out during data entry, etc. This is the standard state of most software people interact with on a daily basis.
If current IT didn't absolutely suck for most people, and hadn't become a means to it's own ends I think you'd see a lot less pent up demand for these vibe coded one-off applications that solve a specific problem for a single user.
It's been interesting to watch. Normies can finally get stuff done without the IT and developer gatekeeping and get on with doing the meaningful bits of their jobs. For better or worse. It's certainly going to blow up in quite a few cases, but I think the cat is out of the bag if progress in tooling - not even models - continues at a rapid pace.
This sounds exactly like the promises of putting a PC on everyone's desktop rather than a terminal connected to a locked-down mainframe, which in the end led to the lockdown migrating to PCs and the few employees who had any interest in automation forced to use tools like Excel because it was at least an improvement over VBScript and batch files and IT wouldn't let them install legit development tools unless their job description required them.
What are the odds that the average corporate IT department is going to allow the use of anything other than locked-down corporate AI with strict token quotas and stricter acceptable use policies?
> They can't even write readable, intelligible code.
That really is no longer an up to date view of LLM's. Frontier models can and do write readable, intelligible code.
They can also write shit code.
Kind of like human devs.
Because even with AI I don’t have infinite capacity to make every piece of software well designed and I have other deadlines.
>They can't even write readable, intelligible code.
Skill issue.
trying to make money off an invention is perfectly reasonable.
Indeed, a couple of GUI forms on top of curl is right up there with electricity, antibiotics and sliced bread.
then why haven't you done it?
Because we don't have that special sort of brain that thinks turning such a simple useful tool into a commercial behemoth is a good idea? I doubt anyone there really things there is a useful purpose to it all, but they have to keep it in motion to keep their pay coming in.
the world is what you make of it. make something, sell it for exactly what you need to buy bread . I don't see why being so cynical is necessary.
Right now your boss has sold something, and pays you with the remainder. Is he a bad guy?
What's wrong if you did the same?
Silently installing hooks into your other tools, to route their traffic through Postman without your knowledge or consent, is not at all reasonable.
you skipped a node in the tree
How you try to make money off an invention may be perfectly reasonable, or it may be perfectly unreasonable. The "how" matters here.
nearly every "how" is going to trigger some haters.
Yes but they’re clearly not all equal. Not everyone is a “hater” for thinking that basically installing malware to make money is bad.
There are legitimate, ethical ways to make money, and then not so ethical ones. It seems for tech companies, they often can’t find the ethical ways or they simply don’t produce enough money, and so they feel forced to act unethically.
The only reason they get away with it is… well everyone is doing it. It’s a culture problem, and it’s viral to the entire tech economy. Nobody cares about being scummy, doing things behind users backs, invading their privacy, employing dark patterns, or even leaking highly sensitive data.
this is a bit of a bait and switch. The immediate comment was about opportunism in general.
People hating you for the damage you cause while making money is also perfectly reasonable.
People here forgetting how forums work.
Postman is not an invention.
Its not that complicated, most engineers could write their own tool in a day or two.
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.
Suit yourself. Always diamonds in the rough and you can check repos I star on Github.
I built software to manage my own e-commerce business before AI coding existed but see teenagers I mentor vibe code applications that are actually helping them make money. They are 5-7 years ahead of where I was at their age and I started the e-commerce business in college.
And these people are making software for themselves and opensourcing it. So what are you on about peers resolving problems?
One effect doesn't exclude the other. I'm talking about people creating more problems than they are solving because they lack a fundamental understanding of how their systems, and the generated code that acts upon them, actually work. They're enamored with the ease and alacrity with which they can generate code but unwittingly leave a host of issues to be cleaned up. It's usually other people who discover the problems because these suddenly productive "authors" didn't have the know-how and awareness to create exacting enough prompts or sufficiently iterate on the generated output.
It's a phenomenon I've observed which doesn't necessarily take away from the benefits you've found. But maybe it's worth some consideration that this shift in empowerment isn't without negative consequences.
Have you built something you actually use? The feedback loop is immediate. You tell Claude and it goes it and fixes it.
You realize mostly proprietary software is made by people that haven’t even worked in that niche? Now people in that niche with these immediate loop can make software work way better and faster. Without the risk of it getting worse over time or selling out it a PE firm like Bending Spoons.
So long as the token price stays low, because if it doesnt you will need the PE firm to pay for your tokens.
Not if you reach for something open-source and use that as the starting point. Most B2B customers are small businesses and once they build bespoke software that works with their business, they won’t need loads of tokens to keep it running.
Can you share any of these many open source projects? I am curious about them.
Sure
fx0
https://github.com/vercel-labs/fx0
It’s by Vercel Labs, but it’s a small team and it’s basically a small website builder and even comes with 5 free prompts. I’m building on it to build a universal storefront
Moss Keeper
https://github.com/ChetasLua/moss-keeper
Someone who got early access to Fable 5.5 asked it to make an anime style video using html and it’s amazing. I might make a short film doing this one day.
Money Shot
https://github.com/SocialAcolyte/monet-shot
A sort of screen studio alternative with a twist
MailCheap
https://github.com/marclou/mailcheap
Opensource alternative to BeeHiv
These are my latest stats on Github: https://github.com/junaid33?tab=stars
> 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 worked at a company where postman was (incorrectly) set up, used by everyone in the company, including non-devs and the ops team to make API requests instead of letting us develop tooling... Everyone hated it, but the company kept paying for it.
Hell, our CI test suite ran Postman, but because that was badly set up if a test suite failed, it required manually editing some state, otherwise the Postman state got fucked and everything would fail.
Did we still continue paying for it, you might wonder? Yes, of course we did.
Probably. They’ve been sending a lot of emails with creepy hyper-personalized AI-generated marketing material, trying to get us on an Enterprise contract. Things like slideshows that have the names and profile pictures of my colleagues who use Postman. Very weird.
This seems to be a trend now. I guess the dumbification is already started because I can't imagine a sane marketing person thinking this would generate positive leads. Unless they are targeting the same dumbified people.
corruption at finest. There is no reason to use postman when hoppscotch or bruno is available.
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!
Well with a proverbial lawnmower at the top of the org chart, how many sets of weed-whackers, pruning shears, leafblowers, and RoundUp dispensers are below it?!
Don’t forget the community manager, people lead and chaplain.
This is the modern capitalist model.
So many talkers making speeches and powerpoints and nothing else.
they are going to annouce layoffs laying of that 1 developer
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.
Well, I guess if people need things to do, and others are willing to pay, then what’s the problem?
TFA is the problem. There is no actual value proportional to their expenses, so the only path is enshittification and grifting.
To be fair, is there a good reason that it should be?
was there a good reason for a search engine to provide email service? :)
If they can charge for it, why not? Search is an important part of mail for many users, so there is some cross-over in knowledge/experience that can be leveraged.
And assuming you mean Google, the question is based on a false premise. They were an advertising company years before gmail was introduced, and an ad-tech company being able to trawl your mail to find ways to advertise at you is a very different proposition to a search company releasing the same product.
> being able to trawl your mail to find ways to advertise at you…
much like POSTMAN can trawl through all my API calls to see what other business they make from all this data they are mining now, yes?
can it send email yet?
If you use an api?
As someone who hasn't used it since like 8 years ago that reads like satire
Wait till you hear Docusign has 7k employees...
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.
I switched to Bruno when payment started requiring login, love having the ability to just check it into git.
Ah thanks for name dropping Bruno. I actually never found the Postman alternative I was looking for. Using wget is fine. It would be nice to have an interface with collections again. Will check out Bruno this weekend…
Exactly. Back in 2015 when I was still coding professionally Postman was our go-to tool for API testing.
Earlier this year I reached for Postman when kicking off a side project. I was appalled by how convoluted it has become. It really is a Frankenstein product. And they can’t seem to figure out what their offer really is.
No thanks. RIP to the OG Postman. The new Postman is dead to me.
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
I must say, this style of UI has become really grating even for toy projects.
the claudish here is almost unintelligible as well
I'm not sure why I'd trust a site that gives OpenAI and example.com equal marks as "already dead" because they're "vulnerable [...] to AI-native replacement" for anything but a laugh.
"Our models are busy right now. Please retry in a moment."
Hacker News (comment) hug of death? Or victim of its own punchline?
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+
Because, current valuations are completely detached from any operational or market realities that affect a company. The metric has become the goal, and the metric is controlled by nontechnical people that have no intuitive understanding of how technical products are used. Even worse, they’ve all gone though a vibe coding tutorial and now either believe they have real technical depth, or believe that it doesn’t matter.
Technical is subordinate to business and always has been (apart from a bunch of last century hackers with university tenure). If business no longer thinks it can make money with human developers, they'll be laid off. It doesn't matter whether the product is better or worse.
That’s business administration, which has nothing to do with the valuation process, anymore. A company could be run by some trust fund kid with no understanding of business that hired a full-time department of 10 people to repaint the lines in the parking lot every day, but if their story was impressive enough, their valuation could be astronomical. It’s all about vibes (in SV, at least.)
> 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...
You don’t know any developer yes.
I do know business analysts, testers, non-technical people asking me for postman collections.
Postman became de-facto standard for businesses. Even though devs have ditched it.
I haven’t met anyone using MongoDB in what feels like 12 years, but it’s a $26B company.
There’s apparently a surprisingly profitable enterprise afterlife to developer tools that manage to become popular in the right moment, even if the moment is fairly short.
Databases are extremely sticky because migrating can be a nightmare. Postman seems like it would be much less sticky, you can just import your Postman collection to Bruno and it's pretty much a drop-in replacement.
I feel called, mongodb user here ( • ▽ • ; )
Evaluate Postgres. It's a great jack-of-all-trades, as is the relational model in general.
I’ve never understood the allure of postman. Curl has been my thing for a while. I don’t see that changing.
If history has taught us anything, it's that there's at least a limited-time market for inferior GUI alternatives to nearly anything you can easily do from a command-line. Though to be fair, there's plenty of room for value-add over curl for web requests in terms of presentation where GUIs can work well: asset viewers, syntax highlighting, pretty printing, code folding, etc., especially if combined with interactive tools for decoding and deobfuscation that feed back into the viewer.
The obvious AI integration is reverse engineering tools, assuming the trend towards locking such things down doesn't continue.
And honestly, I worry less about people paying $29 for a GUI file renaming tool than I do about the same people copy/pasting LLM-generated shell snippets, given that LLMs will inevitably have trained on the existing corpus of shell scripts, many if not most of which contain potentially dangerous bugs, especially when used outside their intended context of known-trustworthy input.
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.
> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+
Like statistics, 90% of valuations are totally made-up.
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 wrote a lot of python. Whenever I was working with an API, I'd just spin up a jupyter notebook and write out the calls I wanted to try out in a python notebook, once I had everything working, it was just a copy paste job into the codebase.
Using some kind of dedicated tool like postman always felt like a literal step backwards.
I know lot of bits with curl. But I find it always a pain to use. Fine for when you do scripting but I find command line pretty painful overall. So I understand want to use some other tool with better ergonomics.
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.
Yeah, Insomnia replaced Postman everywhere I've been.
> Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees
Wtf!! how
>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.
The good thing is that now takes about 2 days to replicate with an agent the parts that matter from their whole offering and tell them to go f themselves.
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
We're using Postman at work (I think we have a subscription for 10 or 20 users), mostly when doing REST development and to share the API calls between people. Though I rarely have to use it so each time I'm so confused of between the collections, environment, vaults, variables...
Also if you have an alternative that's easier to use, I'm interested
We switched to Bruno 2 years ago. Haven't used it much lately but it was a really good replacement at the time.
They chased B2B revenue too hard, my work built internal alt in a few days that fits more appropriately with our orgs usecases earlier this year, Sad lol
> 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).
Definitely a "good" alternative.
https://insomnia.rest/features/api-debugging
or any of these
https://apisyouwonthate.com/blog/http-clients-alternatives-t...
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.
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!
https://hurl.dev/
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
Claude.
I use Yaak
I always felt like Postman was just a waste of time next to simple bash helper scripts wrapping curl commands.
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
Its endemic in enterprise engineering/QA, for all the reasons we mourn its loss its big, and big is trusted in these circles
That's momentum, not utility.
Any non-programmer can now copy-paste http requests from Dev Tools or a free-tier LLM for a better service than Postman.
New companies have no good reason to use Postman. Old ones can slowly migrate away.
Doesn't help that the core product is one of the easiest vibe-code prompts ever.
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
>>>I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore.
Just out of curiosity, what are developers using these days?
I personally use Bruno: https://www.usebruno.com
They took VC too after saying they won't. They have 50+ employees for some weird reason instead of 5. Sigh
At work we use JetBrain's HTTP client: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
My IDE has always been for a lot more than coding, so even though most of the coding is now done in a terminal by an AI agent, I still spend many hours everyday in my IDE.
There are a couple of open source alternatives (though at least some of those have tried to go the way of Postman to some extent), just using curl directly, or we've rolled our own wrappers (personally, or team- or company-wide) for our specific use cases.
rest-client[1] or httpyac[2].
1: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...
2: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anweber....
Claude, here are the api specs, see if they are up to date, build a client, make no mistakes. Unironically.
https://yaak.app/ prev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43185836
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.
I know right? I would think even $5M would be excessive. It’s interesting that with AI now anyone can throw something together like that within a few days. Investors are probably squeezing them pretty hard to get their returns back before anyone and their uncle can create their own postman.
> 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.
> and most terminals have a hard time using the mouse to reliably edit a cURL command
This is true. Even though I'm not much of a mouse user for it, I tend to edit curl commands of much length in a text editor when I'm doing things by hand, then pasting into the terminal.
> especially if the last command didn't do a final "\n" output
Or if your prompt outputs something to stderr instead of stdout so it doesn't get counted when the shell is trying to position where you are in editing the stream. Ubuntu's default prompt under byobu is a pain for this when I move to a different machine and forget to carry my tweaks for that.
For the missing final \n I just hit [enter] an extra time, but getting round the stderr thing isn't quite that simple.
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.
ditto.
the only time I'd tried postman I got SaaS vibes from it, and I'd seen enough SaaS slop by then.
curl and jq is all I've ever needed for working with http APIs and JSON responses.
You're stating this on your combinator forums of all places. Do you know who owns and runs that company and their economic principles?
Sales called me a couple weeks ago. I told them Postman had a bad reputation among developers and I wouldn’t be using it. The salesperson was just absolutely incredulous that anyone could feel this way. It was pretty funny. Maybe they’re drinking their own Kool Aid.
1500+ ppl? :-O
I feel the same way about docker. This things just running containers and yet its a billion dollar company.
When was the last time you heard about a VC-backed company going out of business? They either go unicorn or they get frozen until another VC-funded company is large enough to absorb them and quietly absorb their lack of value. Postman is a big morsel but I guarantee some company is being lined up just perfectly to consume them.
Yeah. Curl the little side project:
https://xkcd.com/2347/
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
Everything will be enshittified, it’s not a question of if but when. The incentives are simple, the stock ticker must go up.
> 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.
>* 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.*
SQLite would be another strong contender.
> 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/
Bruno is not so dissimilar, unfortunately. See this long thread[1] about their "journey".
[1]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/discussions/269
Yeah I am aware fo the open source base with subscripton model they have. I hope it doesn't go the direction of N8N because that's a fuster cluck.
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...
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.
Borrowed your own rhetorical style as the fastest means to relate to you, text on a screen.
OP is all "here's my way" and you're all "weird take" where weird felt wielded like a pejorative relative to OP not using GUI for everything.
Didn't realize it was possible to attack someone with their own rhetorical style. Figured they'd be used to themselves by now.
You can try www.APIKulture.com
It is basically that, also similar to Bruno but using 20 times less RAM.
Postman logs detailed information on every single API request you make through its tool, including query parameters. If you use the templating syntax `{{some_secret}}` to fill in a query parameter, it sends the actual secret content of `some_secret` to Postman's servers. If you disable outgoing network traffic to this logging endpoint, the entire app will stop working properly.
I discovered this when investigating whether Postman is HIPAA-compliant (it is not).
I am still dumbfounded what value Postman can make in capturing all the publics usage. Sure they could mine the data, but they cant exactly use it in any legal way so why bother ?
That sounds all sorts of illegal, and all sorts of immoral.
Did you flag it / create an issue?
Yes - I wrote some public posts, and a Medium article which I forgot about until just now: https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...
My main point was that I wouldn't want my secrets to ever be sent to Postman under any circumstance (or alternately, stop calling them "secret"). A lot of the online responses were some variation of "why are you sending secrets in query parameters in the first place?" (I'm not). When I posted on Reddit, it escalated to targeted harassment by people who were obviously current/former employees at Postman.
I did send out an email blast to a bunch of CIOs/CSOs in my network which went a bit "email viral" through forwarding, and this ended up triggering a substantial amount of enterprise cancellations.
> some variation of "why are you sending secrets in query parameters in the first place?" (I'm not)
The example from the blogpost: `http://localhost:4000/patient/{(SECRET}}`
Wherein the logger logs the final URL with the secret.
I think I agree with the masses? It strikes me as an odd place to put a secret.
But to your credit, they also... shouldn't be logging endpoints? Secrets or no. That's basically what this person said responding to your post: https://medium.com/@fsufitch/if-you-are-writing-this-off-as-...
> Postman is, in essence, "looking over your shoulder" and jotting down all URLs you query
github.com/alainnothere/mailBoy
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50359814
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.
Mostly enterprise teams and intermediate devs from my experience. I lead the API platform for a popular e-signature company, and a postman collection is the first thing devs ask for. Even when we point them to our docs, they'd rather just import a collection and start hitting endpoints immediately.
Haven't heard of Bruno until now. Looks like a solid offline-first tool. I don't see a public collection or web runner, and it looks like it supports GitHub-based sharing. Postman on the other hand, their public API network (or whatever they call it) along with the web runner reduce a lot of friction for API vendors like us and for dev teams who just want to quickly play with the API in the browser, especially during their evaluation stage.
You commit your collection to git if you want to share it.
Switched from Bruno to Voiden, it's more of a postman + notebook. Bruno started adding premium and stuff and I didn't want to wait to migrate again...
It was really good until... idk 3 or so years back? Whenever they started forcing you to login to use it.
bruno is really great used it for a while but the 5 API syncs a month on the free tier is a pain, had to switch to Apidog never been so happy with unlimited syncs
Bruno is no better in the way that matters - curl/requests/httpclient etc. are now easier to write and understand than any external templating tool.
Use to work at one org in a bloated financial company that was paying Postman nearly $40,000 a month for a license provided to every person in the org. Regardless if they were a dev or not. I suspect the sales pitch pushes for unnecessary licenses because out of around 500 employees in the org, only 80 were developers and out of those 80 only one single team used postman. So this one org was overpaying by nearly >95%, doubt this org is truly unique regarding this.
I suspect that nearly every single public corporation are likely overpaying for software products, it's a waste of capital and extremely inefficient. All it shows is that corporations are too loose with their money and can probably deserve to get their tax obligations increased by a good 20-40% if they're this okay with wasting it.
I use hopscotch and highly recommend it. Very similar UI to postman and it just works.
I'm not really a vibe-coder but it seems like the easiest possible tool to vibe-code
Or just give your agent JSON and tell it to use curl
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.
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
Bruno is VC backed [0] and will (eventually) do the exact same thing for the sake of growth.
This is even after they said they would never raise money, but again the users were not going to pay for Bruno nor donate even.
[0] https://blog.usebruno.com/the-funding-announcement-we-never-...
Aw, fuck.
I will just keep using curl
FWIW Bruno can be forked unlike Postman. Not to mention, it would be trivial to vibe code something like this now. Postman absolutely deserves its downfall for trying to nickel and dime customers.
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.
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
Mad respect. Kreya is my go-to for playing GRPC endpoints. Basically every other tool has some whacky behaviour, got rapidly abandoned, or had janky ux.
It's so hard to see this happen. I worked for postman for 4 years, and it was a great place to work for a long time. I've also seen how the industry has changed.
As agents start to write all the code, API platforms need to adapt to the new user. That means a complete rethink about how to approach API development.
It's why I'm building Sannr, an API platform built for coding agents.
When API calls go through our client, we capture it and turn it into API context that lives right next to the API code in the repo. Future coding agents have access to the API context and don't have to relearn API lessons again.
The API client is lightweight, lives on your machine, not in someone else's cloud.
Sannr is also open source, so you can see the code.
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'm really curious what difference to your lifestyle being a billionaire would be compared to 400 million
Maybe I'm just too small minded to imagine, but having that kind of money just seems so unnecessary to me
Is someone who has $100k reasonable for wanting $1M? Sure, one would struggle to buy a nice house with only $100k. With $1M it is much easier.
Do you think someone who has only $100, whose only thought is how to pay for their next meal or rent check, might similarly wonder “what difference is there between $100k and $1M? They’re both very rich!”
Point is, ambition is like a gas, it tends to expand to the volume of its container. With $400M you have enough for your own and your family’s comfort forever. With $4B it’s less about lifestyle and more about shaping the world to your liking. You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting.
> You might not care about that if that’s 1000x away from where you are right now, but if it’s just 10x away, it becomes more tempting
Nah, it sounds sociopathic no matter what amount of money you have
You can’t just take the VC money and run away.
Why not? It's not like VCs are gambling with their own money after all, they're okay to waste the money of pensioners but rarely, if ever, their own.
I remember it being annoying to use even in 2019.
I've been using Yaak [1] for a while. It is a breath of fresh air.
[1] https://yaak.app/
One nice thing about it is only the builds are licensed. If you build from source it is MIT.
+1 for Yaak, I've used it for over a year for work and personal projects. It is stable and fast (also the dev behind it has the first name as me, so I'm a bit biased towards other Gregs!).
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
Postman was my curl with a gui. Used it everywhere, recommended it everywhere. But one day out of the blue it asks me to login, and it all went downhill from there. Imagine you had to login to use curl?
Anyway, I'm sure somewhere in some terms and conditions I agreed to, it says "we own the glass".
If you're a backend dev writing an API you should be writing automated tests. Clicking around in a GUI app is not the correct way to do things.
If you're exploring someone else's API there are lots of other clients you can use. Resonance seems pretty solid to me. Don't get what's the point of all the extra faff in Postman.
If you want to get real basic there's always ol' reliable curl.
Wow this is bad
Circumvention of the trust model of the agent harnesses (the hash), prompt injection and silently registering an outbound remote MCP endpoint
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.
> [for every] Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well
There's also one available as a major mode for Emacs: https://melpa.org/#/restclient
If the command line is acceptable but you want more of a focus on usability than curl has, there's httpie (https://httpie.io/) and its clone xh (https://github.com/ducaale/xh).
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.
I use RESTer, a Firefox extension, to test APIs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/
It's an in-browser equivalent of Postman.
I much prefer the approach of being able to use the browser for things like this. It feels much more lightweight than installing a piece of desktop software.
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.
And the cycle continues...
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.
fair point
If Bruno turns to shit, I hope that thanks to AI it's going to be easier for a new maintainer to step in and work on a fork
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.
Why not do your own (yes) diligence instead of relying on hearsay? It doesn't take a lot of digging to see it in this case.
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.
Give Sannr a try. It's an open source API client built for coding agents.
It's built by a former Postmanaut, me!
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.
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.
When they started uploading things to the server and requiring you to have an account to access the things that they STOLE from your machine without authorization in first place, I uninstall it...
What can go wrong by uploading your things, if you had any passwords or users there that "pinky promise" will not be uploaded, then running AI and maybe oops have a leak and now someone is hitting your production servers?
Yes, this is very bad. I've alerted my team and we'll be deprecating its use immediately. Hopefully procurement can get refunds on the licenses we purchased not that long ago. Something tells me Postman is going to regret violating people's trust - the moat isn't so large that people must endure unethical, if not illegal, behavior like this.
Many, many years ago, I used Postman for the first time, way back when it was a Chrome plugin. As an iOS dev, it was amazing to be able to validate the requests I needed to make outside the context of my code to validate things worked. Until, one day, I wasn't seeing something iterate in the responses I was getting as I expected to. Many cmd+R presses later, I talked to the API team to check logs, and we found that Postman was caching what should have been independent requests. Easily blamed on Chrome at the time, but it was an undocumented and unexpected behavior by Postman, who really should have better handled making each request unique.
I didn't need another reason not to use Postman, but I'll take it. Shame on them for moving in shadows.
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 never enjoyed using postman even a decade ago. Always felt bloated and confusing ui for something that seems like it could be a command line tool
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.
Already built. Check out Sannr. I'm a former Postmanaut and built it as an open source solution.
Sannr is an API platform built for coding agents that builds API context over time.
Free name idea: GETBoy
It was never, ever clear to me why you needed to use Postman instead of Curl
Been some years since I had to use it (and I think my company jettisoned it shortly thereafter), but at its peak, I remember it doing some things really well that were a PITA to setup locally in a terminal with cURL.
The biggest "Oh my god, this is so much easier" moment was just setting up a tiny JS script onto the login API to stash the bearer token from the return response into a variable, and then propagate it into the header of all subsequent calls. Trying to script THAT in Bash (parsing the bearer token from the return response) was also a headache and never worked 100% for me.
Although that was me trying to do it manually. I'm sure a vibe-coded solution would probably work well enough these days.
I was on a team where work was often presented and demo'd to semi technical managers and stakeholders. For the backend guys, this was the best we had.
Nice to see the leaner alternatives people are suggesting here.
I think because editing in terminals text was not a good development experience, navigating the curdor, and pressing Enter would issue the command.
Personally I use a wrapper cli I built myself over curl which automatically gets api docs of my product and easily get the token so its great for agents
At least for me, the appeal was always minimal.
As a .NET developer I had been using LinqPad for years, and just kept a set of template scripts for the various rote web-call scripts I might need to do e.x. XML or JSON, Auth handling, etc.
(For the non .NET folks, LinqPad is a simple application that lets you write small script-esque bits of C#/F#/VB.NET and has a wonderful little `.Dump()` method that can pretty-print just about any object to it's output window, and even export that output window to Excel/HTML which is nice for some tasks.)
nah, a python script that wraps what needs wrapping has been my go-to since that day Postman said I had to log in
Switched to intellij http scratches ages ago. Then go curl. I remember a bunch of people using postman from a decade to a few years ago. It's been a while since I've seen anyone. Probably people who do it rarely but haven't taken the time to change tools.
postman has been malware since the day they added accounts many years ago. luckily only low skill cli fearing developers mostly gravitated to it, esp anytime in the past decade
I think if you're using Postman, you don't care about sharing your data with random other people/companies on the intarwebs.
Postman management is something else. I remember a few years ago, once they had that VC money, they made it so you had to log/pushed you to. funny, considering it's basically a GUI for curl and then they spent a ton of money on some party with famous singers or something.
A bit sad, but I guess that’s the new normal.
Postman was amazing 6-8 years ago. What a downfall it’s been.
Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.
"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)
What do you think will happen next to every SaaS that was pumped and hasn't exited?
Good to wonder what will happen to every SaaS or every company that has many users it can't monetize any longer.
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.
With AI agents at our disposal, can we not just have them code up something we need to use instead of using such sketchy apps like Postman?
It'd be a personal dev app where only features we need are implemented, including features only we (and no one else) need.
I loved Postman when I first started with it. I was so happy when I uninstalled it about 4 months ago.
I really don't see the point of Postman. It used to be light and efficient, now it's bloated and inefficient
I haven’t used postman for years and I don’t know why anyone would. Are people really paying for it?
If there ever was a tool that could be vibe coded, a postman-like is the one.
Welp, time to vibecode an non cloud version :/
And I'm the weirdo who has always just used curl.
Use impostman.el/verb.el/restclient.el in Emacs.
We left Postman long time ago and only use Bruno.
Man it really sucks because Postman's scripting, automation, and sharing features are nice.
There are few apps more amenable to one shotting with your ai sub than postman et al
Postman really should have known better who their customers are.
Golf playing bill paying ceos and ctos
This is their very bad attempt to survive , who need this in the age of agents ?
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).
We are in the new era of provider malware. GREEEAAAAT! Thanks AI!
The old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be...
Curl Web Interface shouldn't require any payment at all
If even half of that is true then they’re cooked
I miss the native macOS app Paw
Why miss? It still exists, just renamed as RapidAPI → https://paw.cloud
It is still fully native (real native, not fake web-driver native).
I'm a PAW fan but the emails I've gotten from them make it sound like it won't be around much longer.
"No new versions of PAW are currently planned for release. No additional bug fixes, security updates, or feature enhancements are planned."
Nice to know!
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.
Dead product
At this point, with coding agents, it would be stupid to waste time with Postman. I already uninstalled it after using it for over a decade. Build your own simple tools for debugging, my friends. The old archaic era is over.
I built an open source alternative called Sannr. It's an API platform built for coding agents.
As I've mentioned in other posts, I'm a former Postmanaut who built it as a response to the lack of options for agents on the market.
Thanks, I still use Postman out of muscle memory. Will use Bruno or Insomnia (as recommended here)
Unsurprising. I loved the tool but it was obviously time to drop it when they began pushing for logins.
At least it has never been easier to transition to another tool or to make your own.
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 you for the reminder, I had not deleted Postman yet. Done :D
Part of Postman's ongoing enshittification...
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.
With that mindset, why do you even need a postman clone? Just have your $LLM test out the software using raw curl commands.
The last time I opened postman was last year. Now, almost all my projects have templated curls with request-response signatures documented in API.md file per project. Works like a charm.
> 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.
Well, somehow the society has gone for the better over the course of history, even with pathologically greedy and evil people constantly in positions of power, so that counts as something.
Edit: mankind has gone for the better
For the better in spite of the pathologically greedy and evil, but not because of them. A lot of blood has been shed keeping them in check throughout the ages and only recently have they been allowed to feed off of the masses without any real fear. They just hold us back by draining us, stamping out competitors who drive innovation, and funneling everything into their own pockets.
Until we stop relying on SV as the standard-bearer for tech culture? Absolutely.
This happened to me. Holy fuck I was pissed
Thank god we moved to Bruno and sometimes just http files in vs code or jetbrains
Enshittification wins again. :(
How are people still using Postman? You can vibecode Postman in like 30 minutes.
Do you even need it at all now? You can just ask the AI to write you a test suite in 5 minutes which calls all your endpoints with all the parameters and assertions you could possibly want. It's way more flexible than Postman and it's just a text file/script; you can share with any team member.
Yep, you can create a pretty HTML harness even for your APIs.
I'm glad to find out from this comment section that I'm not the only one who has noticed Postman is the poster-child of Enshittification.
who the hell needs that. skills are just md files
Or pre-AI it was a python script inside a notebook.