296 points sidgarimella 1 hour ago 97 comments

georgel 55 minutes ago | parent

Postman went from a great lightweight tool to a bloated up-selling mess.

wolttam 51 minutes ago | parent

As do all great things once VC sinks its teeth in.

999900000999 23 minutes ago | parent

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!

Waterluvian 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

georgel 53 minutes ago | parent

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.

debo_ 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

jmuguy 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

mzajc 52 minutes ago | parent

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

tastyfreeze 35 minutes ago | parent

Bruno is a serviceable replacement that is local first.

amflare 42 minutes ago | parent

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/

Waterluvian 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

gschier 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

Waterluvian 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

runako 11 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

gschier 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

reddalo 13 minutes ago | parent

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/

Keyframe 6 minutes ago | parent

My path was: Postman -> Turns into shit -> Insomnia -> Turns into shit -> Bruno.. let's hope Bruno doesn't turn into shit.

orphereus 53 minutes ago | parent

Does everything have to go to shit when money is involved?

lenerdenator 50 minutes ago | parent

Until we stop relying on SV as the standard-bearer for tech culture? Absolutely.

pizzafeelsright 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

autoexec 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

rs999gti 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

richwater 53 minutes ago | parent

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/)

devmor 50 minutes ago | parent

Switched to Bruno myself, and moved my team to it last year as well. Vast improvement over late stage Postman.

saikatsg 38 minutes ago | parent

They have an open format for API collections: https://www.opencollection.com/

statenjason 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

rs999gti 14 minutes ago | parent

Does anyone know if Bruno is not on the same path as Postman?

reddalo 12 minutes ago | parent

They have a "Pricing" page, so it's a matter of time before it enshittifies. But it's still nice as of now.

Surac 51 minutes ago | parent

who the hell needs that. skills are just md files

fifilura 39 minutes ago | parent

Or pre-AI it was a python script inside a notebook.

dham 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

reddalo 14 minutes ago | parent

+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.

pants2 50 minutes ago | parent

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

sneak 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

FuriouslyAdrift 33 minutes ago | parent

Bruno. Open source base, runs locally, data remains on your infrastructure.

https://www.usebruno.com/

pixl97 21 minutes ago | parent

Yep, this is what I moved to.

pxc 25 minutes ago | parent

Postman has always been proprietary software, hasn't it?

aliasxneo 45 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

radicalbyte 41 minutes ago | parent

Oh THAT'S what they're trying. Doesn't work on me %)

embedding-shape 45 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

writtenone 43 minutes ago | parent

liendolucas 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

darepublic 42 minutes ago | parent

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

alfanick 39 minutes ago | parent

I cannot imagine 1500+ employees "working" on this. Wtf, it's a single person project.

Philip-J-Fry 25 minutes ago | parent

To be fair Postman is a lot more than just a fancy curl client. It's a whole saas platform now.

bartread 22 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

Keyframe 8 minutes ago | parent

can it send email yet?

aldanor 25 minutes ago | parent

1 developer, 10 managers, 20 C-suite, 1468 sales, 1 barista

All adds up pretty well

dalmo3 14 minutes ago | parent

And no one to deliver the mail?

autoexec 38 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

jfyi 36 minutes ago | parent

A surprising number of developers I work with don't actually know how to use curl. Postman is ubiquitous among that crowd.

colejohnson66 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

swatcoder 27 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

guitarlimeo 13 minutes ago | parent

Well put, hopefully it's the latter version.

terribleperson 11 minutes ago | parent

I'm already enjoying the second version. I just hope we get to keep it.

mschuster91 4 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

postmannotlover 27 minutes ago | parent

EDIT: sorry, I was cranky. I just really don't like Postman/its UI/BS. To each his/her own.

bfbf 17 minutes ago | parent

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)

tempestrose 7 minutes ago | parent

Get an older copy of fiddler.

bonestamp2 24 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

ayush--s 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

pjmlp 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

mschuster91 7 minutes ago | parent

> 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...

vanschelven 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

theturtletalks 5 minutes ago | parent

Everything will be enshittified, it’s not a question of if but when. The incentives are simple, the stock ticker must go up.

enbugger 4 minutes ago | parent

It seems like cursed(blessed) niche? In search of alternatives couple of years ago, I'm stumbled upon Mockoon. Now, judging by their webpage, I see they are going the same way

moi2388 48 minutes ago | parent

Thank god we moved to Bruno and sometimes just http files in vs code or jetbrains

toddmorey 46 minutes ago | parent

Why do all these tools require a paid account? Bruno specifically says it’s platform-free and stores everything in git.

saikatsg 39 minutes ago | parent

Bruno has some premium features: https://www.usebruno.com/pricing

plagiarist 45 minutes ago | parent

Unsurprising. I loved the tool but it was obviously time to drop it when they began pushing for logins.

arttaboi 45 minutes ago | parent

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).

Colegno 44 minutes ago | parent

I really don't see the point of Postman. It used to be light and efficient, now it's bloated and inefficient

ediamondscience 44 minutes ago | parent

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?

languagehacker 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

stillpointlab 37 minutes ago | parent

If there ever was a tool that could be vibe coded, a postman-like is the one.

unkn0wn_root 27 minutes ago | parent

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

CommonGuy 21 minutes ago | parent

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

theseamusjames 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

neya 19 minutes ago | parent

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).

rienbdj 18 minutes ago | parent

Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.

throw03172019 16 minutes ago | parent

Postman was amazing 6-8 years ago. What a downfall it’s been.

clickety_clack 16 minutes ago | parent

I haven’t used postman for years and I don’t know why anyone would. Are people really paying for it?

rurp 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

senfiaj 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

IlikeMadison 8 minutes ago | parent

Use impostman.el/verb.el/restclient.el in Emacs.

maxdo 8 minutes ago | parent

This is their very bad attempt to survive , who need this in the age of agents ?

vachina 5 minutes ago | parent

Thanks, I still use Postman out of muscle memory. Will use Bruno or Insomnia (as recommended here)

ebtebt 5 minutes ago | parent

Thank you for the reminder, I had not deleted Postman yet. Done :D

Havoc 5 minutes ago | parent

If even half of that is true then they’re cooked

bottombutton 4 minutes ago | parent

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.