
Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing - synhare
https://blog.getpostman.com/2020/01/06/announcing-updated-postman-plans-and-pricing/
======
__erik
If anyone is looking to switch, I've far preferred using Insomnia to Postman
[https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/)

~~~
gschier
As the creator of Insomnia, that makes me so happy to hear :)

~~~
sidi
Does Insomnia offer hosted documentation of the API collections? That's the
feature which keeps me using Postman.

~~~
gschier
There's a nice community project that generates documentation that can be
hosted [https://github.com/jozsefsallai/insomnia-
documenter](https://github.com/jozsefsallai/insomnia-documenter)

------
scolson
Worth pointing out that postwoman is free and opensource. It is not quite as
full-featured as postman, but for quick mocking without requiring
registration, it is a great option.
[https://postwoman.io/](https://postwoman.io/)

[https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman](https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman)

------
skrowl
[https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/) is a pretty great
alternative. The only thing you don't get for free is data syncing.

[https://github.com/frigus02/RESTer](https://github.com/frigus02/RESTer) is a
Firefox (or Chrome) extension that does most of the same stuff that PostMan
does without requiring a standalone client install.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
[https://postwoman.io/](https://postwoman.io/) is also great for simple use
cases (and is MIT licensed
[https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman](https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman))

------
remote_phone
Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages. I hate how
people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. Most people
expect things for free or very cheap and I blame the Apple App Store for that.
Everyone expects their software to be free or $0.99 nowadays. Even $3.99 is
considered too expensive. All this is doing is creating deflation in our
industry. Software should be expensive. We don’t need unions, we need to
change people’s expectations on how much software costs and not drive down
prices to $0.

~~~
ttul
Software developers should realize that as their salaries increase (and I'm
not even talking about FAANG), companies that are selling SaaS and software
solutions have to charge more in order to continue doing the fine work of
developing stuff.

At the same time, investors are demanding that their portfolio companies begin
to take profits after years of blasting away money in favor of growth-at-all-
costs.

In my SaaS company, we have also increased prices and changed product
packaging to generate greater profits in the past year. Customers hate it, but
if they could see inside the company, they would see as I do that the changes
are necessary to remain in business.

~~~
fxleach
"...years of blasting away money in favor of growth-at-all-costs" \- Maybe
those companies should go under?

~~~
jjeaff
They should go under rather than just raise prices? Seems logical to try
raising prices first.

~~~
fxleach
Agreed, just funny how the commenter says they're blasting away money for
years in one sentence but then seems to try and justify the price increase in
the next.

------
UnbugMe
If your team is using solely Mac, it's now more expensive than using [Paw](1).

(1): [https://paw.cloud/](https://paw.cloud/)

~~~
snapetom
I really like Paw. The interface is much cleaner than Postman. Postman has
more group sharing features, but otherwise, Paw matches Postman's other
features pretty well.

~~~
kstrauser
I do too. It's in my toolbox of "things I rarely use, but when I need it, it's
my favorite thing in the world".

------
chasingthewind
Postman is a good tool that I've used for many years. It's currently open on
my desktop. However I would never pay for their team collaboration features
and I doubt I would pay much for the desktop client if they started charging
for it. There are too many bizarre UI choices, too many missing features, and
it's much too difficult to maintain scripted tests in their awful JSON based
"collection" format. The good news is that they have lots of room for
improvement and it's quite a bit better than some of the older alternatives
like the absurdly awful SoapUI / ReadyAPI line of products.

------
patrickaljord
There's also PostWoman for free (no affiliation):

[https://postwoman.io/](https://postwoman.io/)

[https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman](https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman)

~~~
reallydontask
I feel that we need a new app called postperson :)

~~~
momentmaker
postdude :)

~~~
speaker1
postthey? :) as per [1].

[1] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-
ye...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-year)

------
Nextgrid
I'm surprised nobody mentioned [https://paw.cloud](https://paw.cloud). It's a
Postman alternative that's native (no Electron/Javascript garbage) with a
simple one-time-purchase pricing model.

~~~
gmaster1440
Doesn't seem like it supports Windows, so in many people's case (including
mine) not a viable alternative. Otherwise looks like a great product.

~~~
lowdose
I don't know any dev on a Windows setup, it's either Linux or MacOS. So this
is a very serious question and I even up voted you out of interest. Do you own
the admin rights to your dev work setup?

~~~
Semaphor
Windows, C#, formerly Visual Studio, now Rider. Of course with admin rights.
Do you realize .NET is pretty big in the business world, long before it even
became cross platform with netcore or there being a crossplatform IDE?

~~~
solarkraft
What are the main benefits? Have you tried using it for WPF? Unfortunately I
let my test license expire before I could test much, but remember that it felt
a lot less _awful_ than Visual Studio.

~~~
Semaphor
No WPF, no. Main benefits: Features of ReSharper without the speed tax of
ReSharper ;)

------
dang
The submitted title was "Postman announces 50% price hike starting Feb 2020".
That information isn't in the article, so it would be better to post it as a
comment in the thread, rather than putting it in the title. That would also
allow for supplying more context, such as what the price was before.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
smokey_thompson
I started using Insomnia a few months ago and it's been such a pleasure to
use. I find it more user friendly and less "in your face" than Postman.
Everything just seemed to work the as expected.

[https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/)

~~~
nwah1
I've been using it, and it works for my needs. Supports the various
authentication protocols, and allows you to save calls in tabs.

------
fjcero
Works as well with GraphQL support added
[https://postwoman.io/](https://postwoman.io/). Also,
[https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/) is great

Also for automated testing in APIs
[https://dredd.org/en/latest/](https://dredd.org/en/latest/)

Both open-sourced. I will say one of the best things about Postman was the
Proxy support, but either way doesn't works with the iPhone and other stuff.

~~~
oauea
The entire concept of that postwoman thing is utterly broken. Have they never
heard of cross origin restrictions?

~~~
AndrewStephens
Yes, they have heard about cross origin restrictions. Postwoman gets around
them by having an (optional) proxy that actually makes the request on the
users behalf.

Whether or not you think this is a good idea is another matter, but it works.

------
basseq
(Cross-posted from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831))

I don't know anything about Postman, but this is an interesting case study on
price increases. No one likes price increases, but they happen. So long as you
have a strong ROI use case, you can navigate those discussions with your
customers. E.g., "You were getting a 50x return, but listen, we're running a
business over here, and a 45x return is still pretty darn good."

The challenge in Postman's case appears to be that they ALSO reduced the
bundle components. So you compound the perception from "paying more" to
"paying more but getting less". That's worse optics.

What I'd offer you think about is this may be a perfectly rational and even
optimal customer solution. It's unifying two different pricing actions: price
increase and product bundling. The logic being that many customers weren't
using all the users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and
integrations that were previously included in, say, the Pro bundle.

So as opposed to increasing price by—I'm making up numbers here—12% and
leaving bundle elements the same, they increased price by 10% and cut features
by 2%. The end result is exactly the same, but is actually better for most
customers because they will get the same level of features they needed and not
have to pay that additional 2% for features they weren't using anyway.

~~~
basseq
Note that the alternative here would be to just increase price by the full 12%
and change nothing else. Then _later_ you can cut features and price by 2%,
which people won't react to because "paying less for less" is perfectly
logical. Then those minority of customers who actually needed the 2%
incremental features could buy them ad-hoc, and end up paying the same price.

Albeit, this means that you now don't have pretty bundles, and are selling
features à la carte, which can be hard to manage. OR you make all those
customers upgrade to Enterprise, which they'll be pissed about, but still
falls into the logical "paying more for more" optics.

------
Edmond
For a more full feature set product there is APIMolder:

[https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/](https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/)

You get a mock server OOTB.

------
mrnaught
I work with lot of APIS (our team owns atleast 30 of them) switching between
different environments and have found Paw
([https://paw.cloud/](https://paw.cloud/)) more productive than postman.

------
ardeay
It puts me off that its $6 more a month than Github team, and I felt it was
steep before. We are heavy postman users, and have been from the start. We
will consider different options now.

------
sdoering
> Existing customers using the free version of Postman can lock in 2019 rates
> by upgrading to the existing Postman Pro annual plan or Postman Enterprise
> before February 1, 2020.

So if I understand that right, there will be no free plan from 1st of Feb
going forward. Or do others read that differently?

I should probably start looking for alternatives and saving my API
documentations from Postman somewhat better.

~~~
JaggedJax
They have confirmed the free version is sticking around the same as today.
They are just telling people who are considering upgrading to the paid version
that if you do it right away you can lock in the old rates for 1 year.

------
sdan
One reason I use Postman is to check latency from all around the world.

Surely you could probably setup a ton of ec2 or gcp instances and try that
out, but at least for me, Postman easily allowed me to do that (and might
still stick with them even with the price hike).

If anyone does have any suggestions, that'd be great as well.

------
vorpalhex
Shout out to postwoman,
[https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman](https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman)
which is a FOSS clone. No sync-ing yet but it's on my to do to add in basic
collection sync support.

------
akuji1993
I mean, those prices are still not massive if your team is using Postman a
lot. I don't think they won't lose much business over this move and overall
it's understandable when you look at the expansion of the software and the
probably much bigger team behind it.

~~~
ardeay
Makes me consider the other options now. It use to be best for the dollar.

------
tus88
Curl is free man.

~~~
penagwin
I enjoy testing HTTP endpoints by bit-banging an ethernet cable so that I
don't have to buy a computer.

In all seriousness - Regardless of the solution
Postman/Postwomen/Insomnia/Paw/etc - People use these tools so they can easily
manipulate any part of their query, without needing to lookup curl flags and
nuances.

Serious question: How do you construct complex curl requests? Do you do it all
on the command line? Or you do it in a text editor? If you want to change the
field of a form for your post request, how quickly can you change it? Curl is
a great tool, but for sandbox-like usage it's just too clunky of a UX IMO.

~~~
tus88
It's all REST these days, sometimes with JSON payloads. Nothing too hard to
mangle together.

------
Edmond
Full feature set alternative, APIMolder:

[https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/](https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/)

Mock server OOTB and a bunch of other goodies.

------
ericwooley
It would be great for a competitive app that commits you're collection in your
version control.

Syncing collections is a solved problem that postman resolved so they could
charge for it.

------
joe8756438
For the emacs users out there: restclient.el is pretty amazing. There is a
similar library for vscode with the same name.

------
jiofih
$360/year per developer, to manage manual HTTP request testing _locally_.
Sure.

------
ningsla
Switched to Insomnia and never look back.

------
sebazzz
An I the only one using Fiddler?

------
rc_kas
Good for them if their customer base is so strong that they can do this.

------
bovermyer
Why not just use curl?

~~~
bovermyer
No really, I'm curious. What does a tool like this offer over curl?

~~~
skrowl
GUI, remembering / grouping your requests, saving / syncing your requests to
the cloud / etc.

It can generate curl command lines too.

