296 points sidgarimella 1 hour ago 97 comments
georgel 55 minutes ago | parent
Waterluvian 54 minutes ago | parent
georgel 53 minutes ago | parent
debo_ 51 minutes ago | parent
jmuguy 49 minutes ago | parent
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.
amflare 42 minutes ago | parent
Waterluvian 36 minutes ago | parent
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
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
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
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
reddalo 13 minutes ago | parent
Bruno [1] is the current better alternative to Insomnia.
Keyframe 6 minutes ago | parent
orphereus 53 minutes ago | parent
lenerdenator 50 minutes ago | parent
pizzafeelsright 41 minutes ago | parent
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
rs999gti 11 minutes ago | parent
Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.
richwater 53 minutes ago | parent
I'm currently using Bruno (https://www.usebruno.com/)
devmor 50 minutes ago | parent
saikatsg 38 minutes ago | parent
statenjason 36 minutes ago | parent
Works well enough without getting in my way.
dham 50 minutes ago | parent
reddalo 14 minutes ago | parent
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
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
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.
aliasxneo 45 minutes ago | parent
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
embedding-shape 45 minutes ago | parent
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
People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.
darepublic 42 minutes ago | parent
alfanick 39 minutes ago | parent
Philip-J-Fry 25 minutes ago | parent
bartread 22 minutes ago | parent
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
autoexec 38 minutes ago | parent
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
colejohnson66 21 minutes ago | parent
The problem is that Postman decided to want to be a business and took VC money.
swatcoder 27 minutes ago | parent
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
terribleperson 11 minutes ago | parent
mschuster91 4 minutes ago | parent
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
bfbf 17 minutes ago | parent
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
bonestamp2 24 minutes ago | parent
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
pjmlp 11 minutes ago | parent
Nowadays Portman is forbidden for project delivery, unless the customer development team also uses it.
mschuster91 7 minutes ago | parent
... 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
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
enbugger 4 minutes ago | parent
moi2388 48 minutes ago | parent
toddmorey 46 minutes ago | parent
saikatsg 39 minutes ago | parent
plagiarist 45 minutes ago | parent
arttaboi 45 minutes ago | parent
Colegno 44 minutes ago | parent
ediamondscience 44 minutes ago | parent
languagehacker 43 minutes ago | parent
stillpointlab 37 minutes ago | parent
unkn0wn_root 27 minutes ago | parent
btw - I'm the author.
CommonGuy 21 minutes ago | parent
In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...
theseamusjames 20 minutes ago | parent
neya 19 minutes ago | parent
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
throw03172019 16 minutes ago | parent
clickety_clack 16 minutes ago | parent
rurp 16 minutes ago | parent
senfiaj 15 minutes ago | parent
IlikeMadison 8 minutes ago | parent
maxdo 8 minutes ago | parent
vachina 5 minutes ago | parent
ebtebt 5 minutes ago | parent
Havoc 5 minutes ago | parent
bottombutton 4 minutes ago | parent