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Tell HN: Postman update removes all your stuff if you refuse to create account
365 points by drunner on Oct 6, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 173 comments
I have been using postman offline without an account for a long time. Today when I opened the program it asked me to create an account. When I declined, it wiped all my collections and everything else.

All I have is a 'history' to work with and try to piece back together all the variables and collections that I had setup.

I relented and created an account, but it did not recover anything. Beware!

Update: I was able to manually import/restore using a backup I found in ~/.config/Postman but I have no trust for continued use of this tool. Any alternatives that I can migrate to?




So they quickly followed what their competitor Insomnia did recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37680126

Related "Ask HN: Alternatives to Insomnia?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37691914 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37725326


Insomnia doesn’t wipe out your stuff if you don’t create an account though.


If you updated to v8 and missed the one small text link to export your data before creating an account, then all of your data was gone. Fortunately you could go to Github and download an old version.

If you created an account all of the data was still there. By default the "scratchpad" that did not require an account would not show anything.


Postman doesn't either, but it doesn't tell you where the backup is. Same deceptive shite.


Your Scratch Pad data is safe and accessible. It can be Migrated to a new Workspace, once you create an account, using the 'Cog Icon > Settings > Data > Migrate data' menu option.

Alternatively, it can be Exported from the Lightweight API Client(signed out version) using the 'Cog Icon > Settings > Data > Export data' menu options.


I'm assuming you work for Postman. I hope you know that because of this, as well as the account requirement, other REST tools are going to eat your lunch. I don't think this was a good move.


Appreciate the feedback. Have a lovely day.


Plenty of users reported that updating, being prompted to create an account, and then refusing denied them access to their requests.


It effectively does. You can't access it on the latest version without an account. So either downgrade or make an account.


Postman did it first, unless I'm missing something.


Postman is rolling out updates over time, for many people they only saw the changes now, a couple weeks after the roll-out started.


yep, Insomnia was the alternative to Postman, now the cycle continues...


Which is kinda interesting, in that I know folks who started using Insomnia because postman started enshittification first...

Sad Insomnia made it a race


Is there a duopoly play happening here?


Reminds me of Dark - "The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end." – Adam

Hope Bruno will deliver us from this never-ending cycle.


There are some extensions for VSCode that let you define your requests in a text file and has ways to run the file and show the data.

Here's one I just found: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...

Syntax looks like:

    GET https://example.com/comments/1 HTTP/1.1

    ###

    GET https://example.com/topics/1 HTTP/1.1

    ###

    POST https://example.com/comments HTTP/1.1
    content-type: application/json

    {
        "name": "sample",
        "time": "Wed, 21 Oct 2015 18:27:50 GMT"
    }


Jetbrains IDEs also have builtin support for HTTP files.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2023/10/intellij-idea-2023-3...

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/exploring-http-syntax.ht...


I use it too - it’s excellent, I’d think most developers don’t need more than this.


Yep, me to. Since it's just textfiles I can have them checked into git and share them. Credentials stays in a separate environments file (not checked in). I'm pretty happy with this setup.


There's a great Emacs mode, and it looks like it works in the same way, putting it in a file:

https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el


I use the VS Code REST extension a lot but it does lack some of the aspects that make Postman easier for teams and larger projects. It's super easy to define a "collection" as an .http page for smaller and one-off needs though.


I use this one for tests on microservices endpoints. Very good at least for my use case. I recommend it.


Is it much better over bash file and curl?


It supports curl inside as well as its custom syntax so this provides the same thing.


Anybody know of one for sublime?


I use hurl[0]

[0]https://hurl.dev/docs/tutorial/your-first-hurl-file.html


I've really been enjoying HTTPie: https://httpie.io/

Postman has long been too bloated to be useful.


On windows I even got to enjoy using Invoke-WebRequest directly. Extremely useful since powershell has structured output and input.


I also found it surprisingly how pleasant this was. For all Powershell’s quirks, this is one of those features that just makes sense to me.


I almost ignored HTTPie as a Postman alternative because I thought it was CLI only but learned that it has a GUI now. Unfortunately the GUI seems to be proprietary.

Also we were looking for HTTP/2 support which neither Postman not HTTPie have and found xh which is a HTTPie clone in Rust.


i really like httpie, i didn't know they had an application coming out. This is good stuff.


The GUI is not under an open source license.


I wonder what it is about API client GUIs that warrants such cut-throat competition and practices..


I have found Bruno (https://github.com/usebruno/bruno) to be a decent basic alternative with a nice bonus of being version control friendly, keep in mind that it's fresh and relatively unpolished though - for instance it doesn't ask you to save changes before closing the app.


This one is free from VC funding and promises to stay away from it. So it should not suffer from enshittification.

See https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/discussions/269


The one thing I'm afraid of is that it's a single maintainer project, and while they are active now, I'm not sure how this is going to fare in a few months or so.


I've been at this for 2 years. The project got visibility very recently.

The code is MIT. I look forward to do this for a long long time.


https://www.usebruno.com/

Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37701803


Glad to see alternatives but disappointed that Bruno does not support OpenAPI specification.

At my company, we hand-edit OpenAPI specs in YAML and it gets consumed by many tools that generate types[0], static analysis and dynamic checks[1]. The OpenAPI spec itself is linted[2]. And of course, Postman consumes OpenAPI.

Tools that are built on open standards will naturally see greater adoption over those that use proprietary formats.

[0]: https://openapi-ts.pages.dev [1]: https://openapi-enforcer.com [2]: https://stoplight.io/open-source/spectral


We will be adding support for openapi import and design very soon.


We just released v0.22.0 where we nudge the users to save their requests before closing the tab.

Also, Bruno now supports collection level headers, auth, scripts and tests


Yes, it happened to me as well.

Fortunately I regularly export the collections that still matter.

Now I am no longer a Postman user, as due to NDA's we aren't allowed to store project data on them.

Paying was never an issue, not having a secure alternative is what killed it for us.


As one of the creators, I can recommmend https://kreya.app. It is not open source (like Postman), but has a strong focus on privacy and also stores the data locally.

As it has more powerful features (IMO) than most alternatives listed here, I am a little disappointed that it isn't mentioned more often.


Kreya is the only alternative I've used that prioritizes gRPC support (along with REST). Regardless of source availability, thank you for creating this!


Thanks for the kind words!


There's also gRPC support in Postman's signed out version.


Any chance this can be made available via homebrew? Also, are there telemetry settings I can configure? I frequently work in HIPAA and DoD environments, so the less telemetry tools send the happier those sysadmins are.


Homebrew "support" (and other package managers) is planned.

Telemetry is opt-out and anonymous. More about what is collected and how to disable here: https://kreya.app/docs/telemetry/


Try Bruno - https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

- Free and Opensource IDE for exploring and testing APIs

- It is lightweight with MIT license

- Bruno stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem

- Use git for collaboration

- No cloud sync. Fully offline.

PS: I am the creator of this project


It's like the Netflix series Dark. It's a cycle.

Start API Client

Traction

VC Funding

Bloatware

Deprecate Scratchpad

Delete Scratchpad

Bruno will put an end to this. Honestly, I don't care if I end up making little money from Bruno. This shit has to stop. An API Client need not be VC funded.

It's been a decade now. 10yrs.


Fully offline is a lie. There is telemetry with no opt out.[1] And you should say lightweight compared to other Electron apps if you mean lightweight compared to other Electron apps.[2]

[1] https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/337

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37697206


We will soon add support for disabling telemetry (visit count)

By Fully Offline, I meant to emphasize that we don't plan to plan to support online syncing of api collections to cloud.

lightweight is not just about electron, it's also about being mimimal without all the feature bloat that most people don't need.

Honestly I don't get the hate for electron.. Bruno got almost 50 PRs in the last week by community. We shipped a release every single day to all macOS, win, Linux.

New contributors are able to get the code up and running and contribute code within a day.

This is made possible by electron.


Fully offline means fully offline. It could have been an honest mistake the 1st time. Not after it was brought to your attention.

You said you would support disabling telemetry in the upcoming release several releases ago. And you could have disabled it temporarily or added a warning in less time than you spent trying to justify and deflect.

A fork bomb has minimal features. Is it lightweight?

Your reasons for using Electron are not reasons to make false claims.

People who know the stack can contribute code within a day. It is true for any stack.


Is there a way to use an interceptor on this?

With postman when I could use their interceptor extension on the browser, that would transfer cookies (from when I was logged into an app that was running locally) onto any of postman's requests. That was very convenient.


That's a great feature which we currently don't have.

If you don't mind, it'd be great if you could outline your usecase on our GitHub issue tracker.

On cookies, we are building UI support, meanwhile you can use scripting workaround described here https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/discussions/385#discussion...


Thank you. I will try to create one.

Great effort btw. Awesome to see more open source projects from India.


PostWoman (now called Hopscotch) is a foss clone of (possibly an older version) Postman if you want a 1:1.

https://hoppscotch.io/

If you want "curl but friendly", I like httpie - https://httpie.io/cli


I started building my own 100% local tool in response to the current situation with postman and insomnia:

https://github.com/4lejandrito/fetchbook

I really liked Bruno (https://github.com/usebruno/bruno) but I prefer the flexibility of a real language like typescript and the Request Web API standard.


Highly recommend the HTTP client in the JetBrains IDEs. I looked carefully at the standalones in this category and IMHO it’s the best. Text based so you can seamlessly manage everything with your repo, with automatic features built in from parsing the text.


Yes! Postman is git-hostile i.e developer unfriendly.


Bruno is 'git-friendly' as well 'git-pr-flow-friendly' as well as 'developer-friendly'

Checkout things that you can do in scripting in Bruno which no other client does - https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/discussions/385

You'll love it.


This looks great. The JetBrains HTTP client also supports scripting, including pulling in npm packages.


Am I crazy for using curl and editing the shell cmdline with vim when I need to work with lots of headers?


No, but unless portability is a concern or you're massively familiar with curl, you might want to consider xh. It's much more intuitive.

https://github.com/ducaale/xh


I’m not a curl pro but devtools ‘copy as curl’ gets me 95% there most of the time.

That said, thanks! Didn’t know about this. Definitely adding to the toolbox.


xh is based on HTTPie CLI, which I would recommend over xh since it has better docs and more features.


No, I use curl similarly and a lot. Where I find Postman convenient is when using it against services that use OAuth2. You authenticate once, it fetches the token and you are good to go. Could I script this with curl? Sure. Do I want to? Nah.


This can get old fast when debugging things and when piping through jless or something. Having a nice app that stores the request make it easier to come back too after a few days away. But Insomnia and others went wayyyyy overboard with all the sub sub sub projects. I'd like to have something in the middle.


After the whiffs of enshittification caught my nose I did some research and switched over to Insomnia. I don’t make use of any advanced features, just a pre request authentication call that was a little bit of a pain to set up. But it’s working exactly how I was using postman so it’s a suitable replacement for me


Didn't they just push a similar update where they require an account? And pushed all data into their cloud sync without asking?


When I switched over they made it clear they were getting rid of offline mode. So I said whiffs but at that point there was a turd halfway up my nose


For the emacs users: restclient.el

It’s excellent. Doesn’t have server mocking AFAIK, :shrug:


Another vote for spacemacs + restclient:

https://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+tools/restclient/READM...


I really like restclient - also really makes sense for persisting tests in this manner to source control. Not that anybody else on your team will know how to use it...


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You can give a try to Hurl [1], a CLI open source tool, based on plain text and curl. It allows you to run and test Rest/SOAP/GraphQL APIs (I'm one of the maintainer).

There is no GUI, so Hurl is not a drop-in Postman replacement, but it has nice features: it can be easily integrated in CI/CD, it's fast and it's powered by curl!

A detail: Hurl is given to the community by Orange, a French telco. Orange is not in the dev business, so it should remain free, open source, analytics free for a long time. In any case, you can easily convert Hurl files to JSON [2] in order to switch to another tool or not being trapped in a single provider...

[1]: https://hurl.dev

[2]: https://hurl.dev/docs/frequently-asked-questions.html#how-ca...


This looks really slick. Thanks.


This is how you kill a product. Ill be jumping ship too


I been using 'Advanced Rest Client' (ARC) https://install.advancedrestclient.com/

No accounts required, offline, open source, A little bloated using electron but its multiplatform and a desktop client.


If you’re on macOS, my preferred tool is Paw/Rapid API https://paw.cloud/


yeah, this one is the only thing that i'm missing after migration to linux box. the extensions and ability to write own extensions is very powerful, the speed and native UI were very welcomed, as postman and other electron based tools are just way too heavy for me.


Indeed, it's very well-made and a “proper” macOS app—shortcuts, window management, sleeping in the dock and everything.

My favourite aspect is that it supports both cloud and local projects. Local projects are single binary files which can be synced with iCloud/OneDrive/..., so it's really quite flexible.


I remember encountering Postman years ago when it was a chrome app where I'd fill some fields and use it against a server absent a frontend to prototype/test.

I never understood what's the improvement from having a headless client written in Python using requests or something and the data in source-code, kept versioned? I figure requests or similar libraries have something with sessions and cookies that allows me to issue requests against an active or mock server. This way I can specify the API, data to send each endpoints and possibly also use these snippets in testing.

I have usually taken this Python route when I've wanted something nicer (this is subjective) in comparison to cURL.

Can someone experienced here tell me the value add over something like this with Postman?


Learn and use curl, then you won’t have any issues like this. You can make some scripts in Python or something, too.

I say this because the last three tools I used for this all got shitty (postman, insomnia, and thunder client).


I would rather cycle thorough tools than deal with piss poor user experience of something like that.


One nice thing about FOSS CLI tools is they're easy to script. While it's pretty tough to script general cases, I often find my workflows orbit around a handful of commands, and scripting often can improve the UX by a large margin. It does require tinkering a bit though.


Seriously, python with the requests lib in a jupyter notebook is always a nicer user experience than any REST API GUI, most importantly once it's grown a bit.


That sounds interesting. Can you post some example? How do you share 'collections'?


I really like the built-in `.http` file clients in IntelliJ products. You can paste from CURL and copy to CURL, so interop with CLI commands is very easy.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/exploring-http-syntax.ht...


But is there a VS Code extension for curl?!!? Does it work with ChatGPT?


I think you're joking, but I actually want to know these things when adopting tools now to the extent that it's applicable.


im just making fun of web devs


Curl is not sufficient for rapid experimentation against an API.


Depends how comfortable you are with curl and your workflow. I'm much more productive using curl vs any GUI you give me. Still have OpenAPI specs in my projects but curl is much faster initially.


It falls apart instantly when you need to pass data from one endpoint to another or add any sort of logic like filtering through data - so any time you have non-trivial workloads where you don't want to spend half your time fighting against jq or shell.


> pass data from one endpoint to another

`curl ... > out.json` then `curl ... -d out.json`. Wrap it in a shell script for quick iterations.

> filtering through data

`curl ... | jq | grep`. I don't know of any tool that will find what I'm after faster than the shell.

For bootstrapping and quick experiments curl is right there at my fingertips, no need to spin up an electron app, make a bunch of definitions and all that. When I want something more usable OpenAPI serves as stateful and interactive test environment and documentation at the same time.

I do agree curl can get a little verbose but create an alias: `alias jc='curl -H Content-Type: application/json` and using it is as simple as `jc $URL` for GET or `jc -X POST -d '{ ... }' $URL` for the rest of the methods.

I really recommend getting comfortable in the shell, it's amazing how productive it can be and becoming a bit of a lost art these days. All the tools are composable and working together it's so zen.


You don’t have to fight tools if you learn them, but I understand— as a fellow programmer— that you don’t always have time to learn them. However, it’s pretty easy to use pipes and tools like jq to do complex stuff.


While jq is powerful and I use it in scripts, it's one of the least intuitive languages I use, to the point I have to look up basically everything non-trivial.


for individual users, i've not quite got the appeal of postman.

in larger teams, I did see groups of people collaboratively creating various urls/scripts/tests, and putting some docs with them, to help with the dev and testing (mostly qa/test folks). that was, imo, a relatively legitimate use for a full tool like postman.


What's wrong with thunder client?


Weird pricing BS they just started.


Wow, just visited the pricing page https://www.thunderclient.com/pricing

Hadn't noticed this change (I am not a heavy user) but it does look like its heading the postman way. I moved from Postman to Insomnia to Thunder Client. Time for yet another alternative.


Nope


Bruno is great. Offline. Open source.


Do you use emacs? Have a look at https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el or similar.


Or org+verb https://github.com/federicotdn/verb


That does look a bit more recent.


Is this all stuff that you had kept in your Scratchpad? I think Postman had been warning users for months that Scratchpad would be going away, and that you should migrate everything to a workspace.

I'm not saying the decision is right; personally I much preferred the scratch, because it didn't require a freaking network request every time I want to look at my API collections. I'm just saying, this didn't come out of nowhere.


> Any alternatives that I can migrate to?

If it works for your use case: writing integration tests.

I used Postman in the past but I never really got the point of "storing" queries beyond the history.

I think if you have that need it means it's time to write a frontend to call your endpoints, or use integration tests.


I’ve used alternatives to explore under-documented APIs interactively and suss out their behavior. Then I could use the app’s codegen to turn the query I’d manually crafted into my chosen language’s code.

You can do all that directly in the language, of course, but by the time you go through the trouble of pretty printing the output, parametrizing the input, etc, you’ve reimplemented a less ergonomic version of Postman-and-similar.

(Not saying you’re wrong for doing it your way, but explaining why others might choose a different approach.)


Yes it's definitely not ideal for all situations, this is more for when you own the API.


FYI some of our people internally use Jmeter. https://jmeter.apache.org/

It's not flashy so it probably wont get the standard "we are going to milk you for data" plan


The problem then is that you have to use jmeter, it's a great example of early 2000s java desktop app user experience.


And if JMeter just isn't quite doing it for you, turn the dial back another few years and experience the joy of the MDI GUI provided by SoapUI. You too can experience the thrills of getting to tweak JVM memory options so it doesn't crash when you try to load a particularly large and unwieldly industry-specific WSDL for an interface standard that undergirds major national infrastructure.

Oh and, it actually does do OpenAPI specs for REST and even mock services and all that, so I'm delighted to share that it's actually relevant to this post! :^) What are you waiting for?


What a joke. Great reason to find a replacement tool.


This happened to me 2 years ago, I think it has always been a bit of an issue.


I can’t stand Postman, it’s just clunky in a distinctive Electron-powered way I can’t explain. I don’t get this new wave of dev tools that try to bypass programming but feel more complicated than just programming. The environment variable setting is weird, doesn’t handle /r/n without a plugin.

Anytime I want to automate or do something slightly more complex than run a request it becomes a homework assignment.

I’d much rather just use Python and work up a small library. Everyone has their own preferences in the end and it’s much less painful doing it my own way.


I’d like to recommend Insomnium, a 100% local-first Insomnia fork. https://archgpt.dev/insomnium


Is that what happened? I DO have an account (begrudgingly made because it doesn't just let you do a JSON export of your collections, you have to send it to the cloud and then download it for some baffling reason) and last time I opened it all of my environment variable values were wiped.

I've been wanting to get off Postman for a while. It's so clunky these days, and they're shoving way too much shit in it that I don't care about.


Check out https://recipeui.com! It’s an open source Postman alternative with TypeScript and autocomplete.


another alternative: RapidAPI https://rapidapi.com/

it's a good api client, and it's free for individual use and they have some sort of nifty marketplace integration catalog...thing with remote API servers that makes it easy to find and try API services that offer data / functionality you want to connect to.


It was great before it got acquired, (and was called Paw back then) now the product development has virtually stopped.


I’ve used that for years, from back when it was the paid Paw app, and I’ve been happy with it.


Your Scratch Pad data is safe and accessible.

It can be Migrated to a new Workspace, once you create an account, using the 'Cog Icon > Settings > Data > Migrate data' menu option.

Alternatively, it can be Exported from the Lightweight API Client(signed out version) using the 'Cog Icon > Settings > Data > Export data' menu options.

You don't need to go searching for the data in your file systems.


Top notch developer experience there, Danny. Well done.


Umm, you're welcome.

I'm just sharing information that the OP isn't actually true and no data is removed.


I'm surprised OpenAPI/Swagger hasn't been suggested. Define either as yaml or inline JsDoc comments if you're working in js/ts. I thought it was more popular than postman but I must be living in a bubble.

Local, open source, versioned and can serve as interactive documentation for users. Never tried it personally but it can even generate code from the specs.


My main use case for postman like tools is to get me into the middle of a workflow to reproduce some sort of a scenario. Stateless tools just don't do it, as I need to spend a long time copying things around.


Swagger and its derivatives support example requests and auth. How does postman do it differently I haven't used it in years?


Allows arbitrary scripts to save the context of requests. Hardcoded examples you can't change without committing in contract are not even close to that functionality.


Paw (now RapidAPI) is a very good alternative, though I can't say they wont be under the same capitalist pressures as Postman. I paid $50, one time.

https://paw.cloud/

Edit: To be clear it's an app (downloadable client), despite the url.


I'm not sure why you're downvoted. I still use paw/rapidapi and I think it's great. Maybe downvoters can explain.


the mac client probably wont, as they were already bought by rapidapi.com and made web-based client that looks like PAW but has the same issues as other web-based solution


If you use vs code you can use thunder[0]

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rangav.v...


Not open source, though?


I’ve been using https://insomnia.rest/ and it has everything you need and does not require you to log in


Sorry, but they pulled a Postman already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37680126

No reason to trust them at all at this point.


Weird. Mine doesn't, and it's been 8 days since that post. I even checked for updates, and I'm up to date. Maybe they reverted their bone head move? (I don't use it daily)

EDIT: Maybe they did. See last comment here: https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/discussions/6590


Is it pulling a Postman if Insomnia did it first?


I lost everything in a update with them too. And not a create-account update. Just a regular update one day, and poof gone.


Not very surprised, Postman has continued to get more bloated and pushy with accounts, I ended up just moving to Insomnia after using Postman for many many years.

Edit: turns out Insomnia has enshittified too


Httpyac, to install the VS Code extension, just do:

ext install anweber.vscode-httpyac


I love HttpYac. I use it all day every day.

I stopped using Postman years ago because it got too bloated an "enterprisy".

Also the fact that it syncs all my stuff to the cloud across many consulting clients is a no go. Passwords and other stuff means it is a target for hackers.

Postman is a great product don't get me wrong but my specific use case are around HTTP testing and I want to check everything into version control


Caught a workmate in my team out as well. We can't create accounts and keep it all in the cloud at our job, so we had to find an installer for an older version.

Absolutely scummy behaviour


We need a free Postman replacement tool with Photopea business model that is driven by ads, not VC-funds.


Same. Quite a surprise. I switched to IntelliJ http requests and am seeing how that does for me.


I'm sure it's a bug, they have nothing to gain from it, especially if there's no warning about this.

It's also a good reminder for everyone to back up everything!


It's not a bug to release a version which removed a massive chunk of functionality. It's intentionally fucking over their users who are not willing to create an account.


We’re building an open-source Postman alternative.

1.6m+ users, 100k+ monthly active users, 55k+ GitHub stars.

Web app: https://hoppscotch.io GitHub: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch


Disappointing that there isn't a standalone program like Postman. I don't want to install an extension in my browser to handle CORS.


Didn't Postman start as an extension?


What's the issue with an extension?


I don't particularly enjoy a VC-fueled project having ability to intercept all my browser traffic to handle CORS.


Having a dedicated browser profile is a good solution to this if you’re ever uncomfortable with a particular extension.


Ah, I follow. I was confused because a small, open-source extension should be sufficient to handle sending test requests. Sounds like they're doing something much bigger than that.

POSTman started as an extension; hence my confusion. I was wondering if there was a technical issue I was unaware of.


Running standalone binaries by a VC-fueled project on your host is even worse.

I guess a separate quarantine browser profile is the best of both worlds?


It's a non-starter for me if it requires an extension. I also think it's a matter of time before it goes the Insomnia/Postman route. I'd love to be proven wrong though.


It says on the page the the extension 'enhances the experience ' - it doesn't look like a requirement.


Enhances? Isn't the point to override CORs because the browser will automatically block certain requests. Seems like a pretty critical feature unless all you have are GET requests.


But you raised VC funding right?

Insomnia was an alternative to Postman, raised VC funds, eventually needed to justify that, and suddenly accounts mattered more. They're currently on the same trajectory.

Insomnia is open source but just like OP experienced, a single update can do damage and it takes time for the community to react.

Is this the same company that raised? If so, are you exempt from that? Have you figured out some monetization scheme for what is essentially a glorified curl UI that doesn't incentivize account sign ups?


I wish tech product managers could get it through their skulls: creating and maintaining yet-another-account for yet-another-app is high friction and undesirable. If you're going to give me an ultimatum where I need to either create an account or stop using the app. 99% of the time I'm just going to stop using your app.


If it's just a "glorified curl UI" what's the problem? Just use curl, or build your own, if it's so trivial.

You are kicking the tires awfully hard for a solution to a problem you claim is easy.


That’s actually what I do and did. I have a whole bunch of scripts that allow me to replicate a lot of what Postman did for me.

The problem with these VC companies is that they enter the market with a whole bunch of lies and I was convinced that building on my ad hoc scripts wasn’t very useful since there were multiple alternatives including open source ones.

It’s taken me a decade however to learn that if these projects are VC backed as opposed to having some sort of govt or heck, even a benevolent dictator, they will screw you.

And while I might have learnt this lesson, which so much of the knowledge ecosystem also being filled with VC backed individuals (including this very forum) a whole another generation of potential OS developers will learn the lesson also too late.

And that’s how Silicon Valley has built a massive eco system to suck money out of everything across the globe, especially open source, but not limited to it (taxis, restaurants, hoteling, everything…).


I think it's fair to criticize them given a fair number of alternatives in this thread (with their own shortcomings). It's kind of silly to post something to hackernews and not expect criticism.


Your defensiveness would be better justified if I was concerned about the curl wrapper... and not the VC firms seeking 10x returns attached to said wrapper


Postman is also open source lol. Unless its donation driven without funding its all going to be the same.


It's not open source, only some of the components are.


Can't someone just locally fork one of these apps and use it forever without updating it? What's actually different about manually poking APIs from one week to the next?


Well even curl has a high severity CVE pending announcement, updates aren't always bad!

https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1709103920914526525


Did you read my comment? (Also Postman is not open source, it just has some open source pieces)


I would really like to see Chrome offering an alternative to Postman. For me, it feels natural, to have everything in one place.

What do others think?


its funny because postman started out as a chrome extension


I checked out of postman for a few years. Color me confused in this thread until I figured that part out.




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