Question: Do I miss something by not using Postman? My alternatives for development are "Edit and Resend" of a request (in Firefox) and plain old curl scripts for reusable examples.
We use it a bit at our company. We have a collection file that includes a ton of requests with headers and body. Developers can with ease load that collection file and run it against their own server, and also quickly change to a different server with just a click.
I guess a substitution would be a git repo with curl scripts and environment variables?
We also have some non-tech people who use postman to run tests.
Not Postman specifically but a client like that will allow you to prepare a whole set of different requests and save them so you can build up a test suite, plus some of them do things like scripting, chaining requests together etc. It's like the difference between a text editor and an IDE, so it depends on your needs really.
At the end of the day with Postman you wind up trying to codify requests via collections, which tends to just be programming in a more limited language.
To be fair, Vim and Curl are almost certainly dynamically linked, so they get to "cheat" a little. 10 megs is entirely reasonable for a statically linked utility intended to "just work" when you dump it somewhere in your $PATH.
Take the Micro editor. It's written in Go, and packs a fair bit of functionality into a single 12 meg static binary (of which a few megs is probably the runtime.)
Oooh this is neat! I've been using hurl (https://hurl.dev/) for the last few years and while it's fun, I've ended up with a ton of text files floating around a folder instead of any kind of organization. Might have to try this.
Wow, I've been looking for a postman/Bruno/foo replacement that I could use inside a remote ssh server or remote dev containers in vs code. This might be it!
RubyMine, and I assume its cousin JetBrains IDEs, has a great HTTP client (Tools -> HTTP Client) that I've used when I need this sort of functionality. I've been off of Postman for quite some time, since it got so complicated, and all I wanted was something to help me make simple web requests. (No disrespect intended to those who like Postman, it's just too overwhelming for my needs.)
> RubyMine, and I assume its cousin JetBrains IDEs, has a great HTTP client
It's great. You can even paste a curl command into it and it will automatically convert and format it. You can then use the Copy button to convert your changes back to curl.
Quick request, if it's doable: would you mind making a portable version of this? We're super locked down on our machines (even as developers), and all programs that need to be installed need to be approved. Portable programs fly under the radar, so they're easier to try discreetly, then we can make an official request to get them approved.
Curious to know more about the commercial licensing scheme for Yaak: if i’ve read correctly, purchasing a pro license if based on « good faith » as the features are exactly the same as the MIT licensed Hobby version?
Sincere question, been studying lots of OSS commercial licensing and always wonder what works in which context
Yes, it's a good-faith license. The license doesn't even apply to the OSS version (only prebuilt binaries).
The bet is that super fans will pay for it in the early days and, as it gets adopted by larger companies, they will pay in order to comply with the legalities of commercial use. So far, it's working! The largest company so far is 34 seats, with a couple more in the pipe!
I am sure everyone making shareware in the early 1990's would have loved to spy on people to know how many used their software for free (and have a way to spam those users to try to sell more licenses), but they couldn't and just did without that.
You can be an Oracle and audit your customers and develop that adversarial relationship. The idea is that that sort of thing makes you rot in the long run.
Thank you for your honest and detailed answer! Great to see it’s working so far and this allows you to build a true OSS product in the meantime, i really appreciate that (i think this is the biggest benefit of your licensing scheme)
Under pricing for the hobby tier you could add as free or pay what you want. $50/yr isn't crazy but might get a few smaller donations if that was an avenue.
If I asked my security team could I use yaak, they would (probably) say yes, and legal would say under no circumstances am I to use a personal license, they will pay for a commercial license. Large companies are incredibly risk averse when it comes to stuff like this.
Been using Yaak for 6-9 months now, initially built from source, but now a paying subscriber. Recently saw that you post open metrics[1] on subscriber count and revenue, and love getting a little look behind the curtains.
I love a solo dev building from scratch is going up against an entire team and company who have years of head start, alot more money and a product that the solo dev originally wrote for them.
And the solo dev has a better product already and might actually win haha.
I was looking at Yaak, and wondering if you've plans to bring it inside VS Code some day?
how would someone use this in a project that operates within VS Code Remote where the source sits on a remote server and isn't physically on the file system.
In case you aren’t familiar (and with apologies for my verbosity if you are): VSCode Remote can be best understood as a sort of hybrid of a local text editor and a remote web-based or X11 view of an editor for a remote session.
When you use a remote, the code is on the remote and all your editing functions (search, version control, terminal, extensions) happen in the remote via a worker process.
So in a remote session, everything is “local” to the remote. You may have no file “mount” of the thing at all on your host desktop machine. If you do a git commit, it’s running inside/on the remote. If you do a file search the files are searched on the remote, rather than downloading them over some network filesystem and searching locally.
The GP’s point is, I think: if you implemented Yaak as a VSCode extension, it could be made to function either in a local session or inside a remote (on a server accessed via SSH, a docker container, on the linux side of WSL etc.) and therefore have fast rather than slow access to the code, git repo etc.
I do essentially all my dev work (apart from compiling the odd mac app) inside remotes of various kinds to create reproducible environments, avoid cluttering the host, sandbox the tools, give me freedom to work from more than one machine etc., and I run into this sort of thing quite a bit.
There are at least two clients like this for VSCode —- Thunder Client and EchoAPI, and I believe both function in a remote session.
P.S. I loved Insomnia before the bad happened; it really helped with learning APIs. Thanks.
The REST Book extension was made by a VS Code dev and does a decent enough chunk of what is needed, at least for simple use cases.
Handy Dandy Notebook as well, but that requires some reformulation to get everything in terms of standard curl/node/python/etc commands. (whether that’s better or worse than a custom http dsl is a matter of some debate)
This looks awesome! I've been wondering what to do with Insomnia since its enshittification.
One idea: since you are doing good-faith licenses anyway, maybe you could add in the possibility to pay for some kind of one-time license? I don't particularly need or want updates from my API tool, I just want it to work and not break. I would be fine with paying a one time commercial license that gives non expiring right to use a particular version.
Can you provide clarity on is a commercial license is needed. The license appears to be MIT but the yaak.app website gives the impression a license is required, even stating as such in FAQ.
The commercial license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run the OSS version for whatever purpose you'd like. Check the last FAQ on the pricing page
You should consider updating your free license to allow some time period of professional use, otherwise it's not possible to evaluate it at work without violating the license.
It's possible if you build from source, even in the commercial environment. As the last item in the pricing page says, the license only applies to the prebuilt binaries.
off topic, sorry: Looking at the docs and I don't find a quick answer. I really want an API client that will do OAuth and handle token refresh, and I haven't found one. The use case is that (obviously) I control the redirect URI, so I'd like to map it back to client (some kind of proxy that I run and make external with all of the requisite DNS and TLS) or maybe via a hosted service (which I'm willing to accept for the convenience.)
I haven't used postman or insomnia in a while since they went to the cloud, so I could just be missing it, but that's also a non-starter for me.
One thing I despise about postman is how much friction there is to creating a new request. In my line of work, I'm often using an API client as a scratch pad to validate /poc. At the same time, it would be nice to just have a simple "history" that I could go back and search if I needed to find some request I made a few weeks ago.
This looks great. If you can wait 8 years before you sell out, that should be long enough for me to retire. Give me a headsup if they offer you a billion earlier so I can start looking for Yaak's replacement.
A lot of organizations have very large suites of postman collections that serve as API documentation, regression and QA testing… they often heavily rely on the postman Javascript libraries and have custom code embedded directly in the collection.
I think for the most part everyone has accepted that Postman grew into a monster that bloated with features and presumably that comes with online dependence.
$dayjob sent an email to everyone with postman installed and asked us to uninstall when postman switched to online. $dayjob IT still maintains a wiki page and includes it on the banned software list. Used to be ubiquitous over there.
If you take a peek at the commit history [1], you'll see that the project started only last week with some very vague commit messages. The code is also quite messy and unoptimized. It's a cool project but not exactly industry-level software.
For a long time I used Paw, which became RapidAPI a couple years ago. Nice little app that does it's job well.
Lately I've just been using a Phoenix LiveBook notebook, with the Req package loaded into it. I can make requests, do arbitrary transforms on the data, and generally stay right at home in a language I like and understand
If you don't know elixir, I'm sure jupyter or some other notebook system would do just as nice of a job
If you're willing to use a CLI, you can try Hurl [1]. It's is an Open Source cli using libcurl to run and test HTTP requests with plain text.
We use libcurl for the reliability, quickness and top features (HTTP/3 IPv6 for instance) and there are features like:
- requests chaining,
- capturing and passing data from a response to another request,
There is nice syntax sugar for requesting REST/SOAP/GraphQL APIs but, at the core, it's just libcurl! You can export you files to curl commands for instance. (I'm one of the maintainers)
I remember when one of the "Core Goals" of Postman was "Complete control over your data - Keep simple JSON based data formats which can be exported and shared as per user needs".
There seems to be a common theme here. Some project gets traction, it works very well. Then they got VC money and the project turn to crap for the community. Not all VC project, but seems to be common theme. I also aware that devs need funding to keep a project going for the long run. Are there any better alternatives for funding now days?
Not sure if this applies to Postman specifically, but I think a lot of software projects start out largely as hobby projects, and might not have even had an ambition of making serious money out of it, and as such there's no reason to be hostile to the community.
Then a VC fund gives these developers a dumptruck full of money and expect returns immediately afterward. Something like Postman likely doesn't make a ton of money unless they're doing something anti-consumer like selling data.
Devs have to eat and if someone offers you a life altering amount of money to work on their hobby project, a lot of them would probably take it. It's hard to turn down something that might assure your family a comfortable life.
That's all good, and I hope they're happy, but they shouldn't expect their audience to stick around if they start to ruin the project that got them there.
Why you and other devs say Insomnia is unmaintained?
There has been a release in september, issues has been solved within last month, and multiple pull requests has been managed (merged and rejected) also recently.
Maybe you refer to issues specific to a platform? Thanks in advance.
I want to judge the devs for it but if a VC walked up to me with a bag full of cash and the opportunity to work full time on a passion project I can’t be anywhere near sure I’d say no.
That bag full of cash will keep being a bag full of cash but the passion project will likely become driven by whoever hands you the bag and will head towards their goals, not yours. Anyway you'll keep the cash. It's not different from what the vast majority of us do with our jobs every day.
The plumber doesn't start to install additional pipes that require an annual fee, or spying on me "because you know, nothing to hide", or any other nonsense we are seeing in software.
One of the things I've thought about for startups are things with the general theme of "complete control over your data", how could I write something like this into the articles of incorporation (or similar) to make some of those values at least somewhat irrevocable?
OK which dumb engineer unsafely wrapped the entire feature flagging / observability / telemetry tooling around the main process of the app such that it wouldn't load unless those libraries resolved?
I'm looking at alternatives that are guarantee to work locally and only found the following:
Posting.sh -> Postman imports are experimental which makes it a non-starter for people like myself with large Postman collections. TUI only also makes it harder to switch.
Insomnia -> Owned by another large tech company.
Yaak -> Made by the same guy who created AND SOLD Insomnia above. Not exactly comforting to switch over for. How long till this one also gets sold?
Any other great local tools out there? I would like to be done with Postman.
The red flag appeared a few years ago already. My company forbade us to use it. This wan no problem for me, because I mostly use curl, but people got upset. We thought this too much restrictive, but ...
I'm using an old version of Postman with their servers blocked through the system hosts file. I keep meaning to migrate to whatever the next best thing is but this setup just works for me.
Postman founder here. I did not time this with an AWS outage of this magnitude but I posted about filesystem, git, and offline support coming to Postman last week: https://x.com/a85/status/1978979495836356819?s=46
Postman has a lot of capabilities now that require the cloud but there is still an offline client built in just for requests.
Building sign-in and cloud features were not due to a VC-led conspiracy. A large number of companies depend on APIs (like AWS) and have thousands of services and APIs. Customers need to manage them and wanted us to build it.
Postman allows for turning off history, keeping variables local, setting up a local vault all in the free product and in more advanced plans, there are secret scanning capabilities for IT and security teams.
These issues are not unique to Postman and apply to all cloud products like GitHub as an instance. Products that are “offline” just shift the burden to the user.
I ditched Postman for Insomnia (Open source) after Postman refused to adhere to customers to disable auto-updates for 6 years+. I checked on their GitHub issue tracker and it turns out, the solution was to upgrade to their "Enterprise plan".
Don't you love how slimeballs cant help themselves though? Instead of just letting free and easy happen the one time a year they go down... they just spit in everyones face to remind them now they have time to go find an alternative
maybe it doesn't do everything postman does, but I'm very happy using the rest client extension in vs code, the http files with the api calls are commited to the source code repository along with the code is easy to use, does what i need, and is easy to share with my colleagues.
In the beginning, there was Postman, and we used it, and it was good. Then, Postman became enshittified, so we switched to Insomnia. Then, Insomnia became enshittified, so we switched to Bruno. Then, Bruno became enshittified, so now it's Yaak.
Let's see how long it takes for one of these programs to break the cycle.
And each of those are just thin wrappers around curl I guess. We should be glad that some good free software could be produced in the past to serve as the foundation for today's greed.
I'm stealing your thread to ask a question: How would you explain what an API Client is to someone who's never used one before, and has always just consumed/produced/tested API's the old-fashioned way?
Is it basically "an IDE for playing with API's"?
Is it only for HTTP-based API's?
Does it come with canned functionality for popular services out there?
I am against government regulation, but at times likes this (or your sous vide and washing machine requiring online accounts to function) the idea for regulations that mandate availability of local server for client server applications is alluring. And making all cloud functionality optional.
It will never disappear, enshittify, or let you down. It's already modern, and has a great UI. It's available everywhere. It supports every protocol and feature under the sun. Those fancy features you think you need: you don't. Whatever you're missing can be easily added via simple shell scripts or aliases.
It’s annoying that the marketing and brand recognition has worked so well. My whole company uses postman and it’s a huge uphill battle to use anything else.
There are SO many alternatives. It’s curl UI wrapper with secrets* management! Why do we all need enterprise licenses??
Off-Topic: I read about yaak app as an alternative to Postman - can anyone recommend an alternative to Stoplight Studio for covering "the other side" by any means?
I loved to use their free desktop app for building API documentations which can be used for scaffolding / generating APIs but for some reason I don't remember right now I had to stop using it.
lately I really enjoyed using http files for sharing http example requests
Question: Do I miss something by not using Postman? My alternatives for development are "Edit and Resend" of a request (in Firefox) and plain old curl scripts for reusable examples.
We use it a bit at our company. We have a collection file that includes a ton of requests with headers and body. Developers can with ease load that collection file and run it against their own server, and also quickly change to a different server with just a click.
I guess a substitution would be a git repo with curl scripts and environment variables?
We also have some non-tech people who use postman to run tests.
> I guess a substitution would be a git repo with curl scripts and environment variables?
Yep, and works well for us.
Not Postman specifically but a client like that will allow you to prepare a whole set of different requests and save them so you can build up a test suite, plus some of them do things like scripting, chaining requests together etc. It's like the difference between a text editor and an IDE, so it depends on your needs really.
The only nice feature is being able to paste a url, get parsed parameters, and then edit all the things using the UI.
Other then that, its same old curl.
These days I use jupyter notebooks and requests.
At the end of the day with Postman you wind up trying to codify requests via collections, which tends to just be programming in a more limited language.
This could have been a 10 Megabyte TUI app in your terminal tab. Boggles my mind how even this kind of app manages to bring in Electron and the cloud.
Edit: Ah, so here it is: https://posting.sh
> could have been a 10 Megabyte TUI app
Wow, in a world dominated by gigabytes of electron application, people thinks 10 MB is the optimal size for a simple utility TUI app.
As a reference, (from archlinux repo), vim’s install package is 2.3MB, curl is 1.2MB, lua (the complete language interpreter) is 362KB
To be fair, Vim and Curl are almost certainly dynamically linked, so they get to "cheat" a little. 10 megs is entirely reasonable for a statically linked utility intended to "just work" when you dump it somewhere in your $PATH.
Take the Micro editor. It's written in Go, and packs a fair bit of functionality into a single 12 meg static binary (of which a few megs is probably the runtime.)
> even this kind of app manages to bring in Electron
Probably because it began as an chrome addon before it was "standalone".
Oooh this is neat! I've been using hurl (https://hurl.dev/) for the last few years and while it's fun, I've ended up with a ton of text files floating around a folder instead of any kind of organization. Might have to try this.
Wow, I've been looking for a postman/Bruno/foo replacement that I could use inside a remote ssh server or remote dev containers in vs code. This might be it!
RubyMine, and I assume its cousin JetBrains IDEs, has a great HTTP client (Tools -> HTTP Client) that I've used when I need this sort of functionality. I've been off of Postman for quite some time, since it got so complicated, and all I wanted was something to help me make simple web requests. (No disrespect intended to those who like Postman, it's just too overwhelming for my needs.)
> RubyMine, and I assume its cousin JetBrains IDEs, has a great HTTP client
It's great. You can even paste a curl command into it and it will automatically convert and format it. You can then use the Copy button to convert your changes back to curl.
This is exactly why I made Yaak [1]. It's fully offline, no telemetry, open source, and can even sync with Git.
https://yaak.app
Quick request, if it's doable: would you mind making a portable version of this? We're super locked down on our machines (even as developers), and all programs that need to be installed need to be approved. Portable programs fly under the radar, so they're easier to try discreetly, then we can make an official request to get them approved.
Curious to know more about the commercial licensing scheme for Yaak: if i’ve read correctly, purchasing a pro license if based on « good faith » as the features are exactly the same as the MIT licensed Hobby version?
Sincere question, been studying lots of OSS commercial licensing and always wonder what works in which context
This is a conscious bet I'm making.
Yes, it's a good-faith license. The license doesn't even apply to the OSS version (only prebuilt binaries).
The bet is that super fans will pay for it in the early days and, as it gets adopted by larger companies, they will pay in order to comply with the legalities of commercial use. So far, it's working! The largest company so far is 34 seats, with a couple more in the pipe!
Having often thought this is how I would attempt to monetize if I built a developer tool, I'm glad to hear that it's working.
It makes good sense because companies actually have an absurd amount of liability to you if they violate your agreement.
Without telemetry, how will you know that anyone at all is using your software let alone only within the agreement of any licensing terms?
I am sure everyone making shareware in the early 1990's would have loved to spy on people to know how many used their software for free (and have a way to spam those users to try to sell more licenses), but they couldn't and just did without that.
You don't - ergo good faith.
You can be an Oracle and audit your customers and develop that adversarial relationship. The idea is that that sort of thing makes you rot in the long run.
How's that been going for Oracle so far?
Everyone of their executives can look forward to 10,000 years of burning in hell, so I’d say pretty badly
They may earn money but are totally rotten. They eat injured souls.
Thank you for your honest and detailed answer! Great to see it’s working so far and this allows you to build a true OSS product in the meantime, i really appreciate that (i think this is the biggest benefit of your licensing scheme)
Excellent work! Looking forward your post about some milestone ARR boundary, the gory details of how you got there.
My runway reaches infinity around $10k MRR so I'll likely do a post around then. Currently 11% of the way there!
I really like that, a scaling license!
I have a suggestion:
Under pricing for the hobby tier you could add as free or pay what you want. $50/yr isn't crazy but might get a few smaller donations if that was an avenue.
I currently direct these people to sponsor on GitHub
I was going to gripe about the price but $50/dev/year is actually pretty reasonable! Nice!
If I asked my security team could I use yaak, they would (probably) say yes, and legal would say under no circumstances am I to use a personal license, they will pay for a commercial license. Large companies are incredibly risk averse when it comes to stuff like this.
Been using Yaak for 6-9 months now, initially built from source, but now a paying subscriber. Recently saw that you post open metrics[1] on subscriber count and revenue, and love getting a little look behind the curtains.
[1]: https://yaak.app/open
Nice! Yep, trying to be as open and accessible as possible since so much of the industry is the opposite.
Currently using Bruno. Saw your comparison. If Bruno has everything I need, what would you say is your biggest benefit compared to Bruno?
Faster, smoother, GRPC, plugins, themes, fully open source, no telemetry,...
Nice!
So you sold insomnia, sold it, and then created another competing tool? There where no restrictions in the deal?
Non-competes expire
I love a solo dev building from scratch is going up against an entire team and company who have years of head start, alot more money and a product that the solo dev originally wrote for them.
And the solo dev has a better product already and might actually win haha.
Underdog story.
Rooting for you!
Ya, it's so funny to be going up against a 1000+ person company as a solo dev!
Underdog? More like topdog!
I fell in love with Insomnia pre-acquisition so I'm thrilled to see it has a spiritual successor. Good on you Greg.
I was so sad to see its decline after I left. Had to make it right.
That Hotdog theme is stunning but I'm not sure if I mean "it's beautiful" or "it makes my head hurt."
Hey, happy user of Yaak here, thanks for building this. Wish you success and peace.
I was looking at Yaak, and wondering if you've plans to bring it inside VS Code some day?
how would someone use this in a project that operates within VS Code Remote where the source sits on a remote server and isn't physically on the file system.
No plans for VSCode integration, no. It's only great because it's designed for a very specific use case and environment.
I'm not quite sure why Yaak wouldn't work in this case. It it because your running server wouldn't be accessible to Yaak, running on your system?
In case you aren’t familiar (and with apologies for my verbosity if you are): VSCode Remote can be best understood as a sort of hybrid of a local text editor and a remote web-based or X11 view of an editor for a remote session.
When you use a remote, the code is on the remote and all your editing functions (search, version control, terminal, extensions) happen in the remote via a worker process.
So in a remote session, everything is “local” to the remote. You may have no file “mount” of the thing at all on your host desktop machine. If you do a git commit, it’s running inside/on the remote. If you do a file search the files are searched on the remote, rather than downloading them over some network filesystem and searching locally.
The GP’s point is, I think: if you implemented Yaak as a VSCode extension, it could be made to function either in a local session or inside a remote (on a server accessed via SSH, a docker container, on the linux side of WSL etc.) and therefore have fast rather than slow access to the code, git repo etc.
I do essentially all my dev work (apart from compiling the odd mac app) inside remotes of various kinds to create reproducible environments, avoid cluttering the host, sandbox the tools, give me freedom to work from more than one machine etc., and I run into this sort of thing quite a bit.
There are at least two clients like this for VSCode —- Thunder Client and EchoAPI, and I believe both function in a remote session.
P.S. I loved Insomnia before the bad happened; it really helped with learning APIs. Thanks.
probably too much work for a solo dev
The REST Book extension was made by a VS Code dev and does a decent enough chunk of what is needed, at least for simple use cases.
Handy Dandy Notebook as well, but that requires some reformulation to get everything in terms of standard curl/node/python/etc commands. (whether that’s better or worse than a custom http dsl is a matter of some debate)
Also: httpBook - Rest Client
This looks awesome! I've been wondering what to do with Insomnia since its enshittification.
One idea: since you are doing good-faith licenses anyway, maybe you could add in the possibility to pay for some kind of one-time license? I don't particularly need or want updates from my API tool, I just want it to work and not break. I would be fine with paying a one time commercial license that gives non expiring right to use a particular version.
Just noticed that with my star on GitHub it now has over 9000 stars!
No way. Queue the gif!
Clearly there should be a super useful widget in the interface that prominently displays the number of GitHub stars !
Very cool.
Can you provide clarity on is a commercial license is needed. The license appears to be MIT but the yaak.app website gives the impression a license is required, even stating as such in FAQ.
The commercial license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run the OSS version for whatever purpose you'd like. Check the last FAQ on the pricing page
You should consider updating your free license to allow some time period of professional use, otherwise it's not possible to evaluate it at work without violating the license.
It's possible if you build from source, even in the commercial environment. As the last item in the pricing page says, the license only applies to the prebuilt binaries.
You get a 30-day trial
off topic, sorry: Looking at the docs and I don't find a quick answer. I really want an API client that will do OAuth and handle token refresh, and I haven't found one. The use case is that (obviously) I control the redirect URI, so I'd like to map it back to client (some kind of proxy that I run and make external with all of the requisite DNS and TLS) or maybe via a hosted service (which I'm willing to accept for the convenience.)
I haven't used postman or insomnia in a while since they went to the cloud, so I could just be missing it, but that's also a non-starter for me.
Yaak does this out of the box. It pops open a browser window and intercepts any redirect. And auto refresh is built in as well.
Awesome. Downloaded. Thanks!
Enjoy!
RapidAPI (ex. Paw) does that AFAIK.
Also, it’s an amazing app.
Still mad about the boring rebrand from Paw but it is still a nice app
was going to say "what makes this better than Insomnia" before i saw this!
> Having created and sold Insomnia in 2019
Hahah, ya... :)
Hey thanks, this looks great. I'm still on Paw but I've been looking for something new since it's been languishing as "RapidAPI" for years.
One thing I despise about postman is how much friction there is to creating a new request. In my line of work, I'm often using an API client as a scratch pad to validate /poc. At the same time, it would be nice to just have a simple "history" that I could go back and search if I needed to find some request I made a few weeks ago.
This looks great. If you can wait 8 years before you sell out, that should be long enough for me to retire. Give me a headsup if they offer you a billion earlier so I can start looking for Yaak's replacement.
I've already sold once, and regretted it. I'm aiming to call Yaak "done" in the next few years and use it to fund my* retirement. See you there
Thanks for making this. May this stay un-enshittified by VC money for a very long time.
Yep, no VC! Though I have invested 2 years of my own living expenses into it, trying to make it work.
Hey Greg!
Hey! Who's this?
You're already going down the path Postman did. No way I'm using that.
How so? It's completely open source and doesn't rely on cloud accounts or servers. It's also just me. Postman has 1000 employees and $200M+ in funding
you use it until he fucks it up and then switch to the next guy.
These api clients are rocket science, the barrier for entry is very low.
This is my retirement project. I'd like to call it "done" within 2 years
Depending on your usage, you may not need a separate app. Jetbrains[0], Visual Studio[1] and VSCode[2] have support for http files.
[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/test/http-file...
[2]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...
The vscore one is a plugin from some random person, to be called built in
In our case, some non-devs use http apis too, notably QA. Bruno currently fills that role.
Last time I checked, they don’t support the exact same format in each product.
Thus, we stick with hurl.
QA seems to stick to robot framework instead. Some use Bruno.
A lot of organizations have very large suites of postman collections that serve as API documentation, regression and QA testing… they often heavily rely on the postman Javascript libraries and have custom code embedded directly in the collection.
I think for the most part everyone has accepted that Postman grew into a monster that bloated with features and presumably that comes with online dependence.
$dayjob sent an email to everyone with postman installed and asked us to uninstall when postman switched to online. $dayjob IT still maintains a wiki page and includes it on the banned software list. Used to be ubiquitous over there.
If you give a man a fish he eats for a day, but if you teach a man to fish you give up your monopoly on fisheries.
It used to considered vile that drug dealers tried to hook their users and force dependence... turns out that they were just ahead of the curve.
Postman is little potatoes - take a look what was done with free YouTube. Bait and switch all the same only stretched in time.
That's funny 8-)
It brought to mind this quote:
“It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,”
From a recent article that came through the feed:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-li...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626691
It's the founding economic principle of the British empire
Everyone accepted because it slowly became standard tool. I have business guys using postman and sharing collections is kind of must.
I hate it, for myself I don’t use it but when having to share API stuff I have to use it because that’s what other people understand.
Good for postman business, bad for everyone.
We moved to bruno, we're quite happy with it.
To second this, I moved to Bruno after Postman became an 'online' tool awhile back and it's done exactly what I've needed since.
I'm at a smaller organization now, it was so nice when we all decided "no way" on Postman.
I switched all my stuff over to bruno. what are you using?
Same.
I made a very simple lightweight yaml based Postman alternative called `yapi`.
https://github.com/jamierpond/yapi
Run this:
With this file: Or just `yapi` to use fzf to find configs.That's a really great concept and I could see how one could get used to the workflow with this!
But, why such low stats on github?! I guess everyone is jamming on postman, eh?
If you take a peek at the commit history [1], you'll see that the project started only last week with some very vague commit messages. The code is also quite messy and unoptimized. It's a cool project but not exactly industry-level software.
[1] https://github.com/jamierpond/yapi
For a long time I used Paw, which became RapidAPI a couple years ago. Nice little app that does it's job well.
Lately I've just been using a Phoenix LiveBook notebook, with the Req package loaded into it. I can make requests, do arbitrary transforms on the data, and generally stay right at home in a language I like and understand
If you don't know elixir, I'm sure jupyter or some other notebook system would do just as nice of a job
Bruno + git has been perfect for our team. Collections in the repo, no external dependencies, works offline. Should have switched years ago.
I had a weird issue when trying to import via pasting curls. I got fixed, and it’s been totally 100% great otherwise
Stopped using postman from about 2018 I think. I think it was because I found it stupid to have to log-in to do API queries.
I didn't even find it that ergonomic to use, to be fair.
Posting (https://posting.sh/) is a pretty cool alternative I’ve used in the past. There’s no reason I can see why I would use a SaaS product for this.
If you're willing to use a CLI, you can try Hurl [1]. It's is an Open Source cli using libcurl to run and test HTTP requests with plain text. We use libcurl for the reliability, quickness and top features (HTTP/3 IPv6 for instance) and there are features like:
- requests chaining,
- capturing and passing data from a response to another request,
- response tests (JSONPath, XPath, SSL certs, redirects etc...)
There is nice syntax sugar for requesting REST/SOAP/GraphQL APIs but, at the core, it's just libcurl! You can export you files to curl commands for instance. (I'm one of the maintainers)
[1]: https://hurl.dev
Apparently Postman needs to be online in order to send “telemetry”: https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...
'Telemetry' that, among other offenses, secretly leaks customer secrets that they expressly claim to protect, according to that post.
"needs"...
I remember when one of the "Core Goals" of Postman was "Complete control over your data - Keep simple JSON based data formats which can be exported and shared as per user needs".
https://web.archive.org/web/20140604204111/http://www.getpos...
not possible once you sign away your allegiance to a VC
There seems to be a common theme here. Some project gets traction, it works very well. Then they got VC money and the project turn to crap for the community. Not all VC project, but seems to be common theme. I also aware that devs need funding to keep a project going for the long run. Are there any better alternatives for funding now days?
Not sure if this applies to Postman specifically, but I think a lot of software projects start out largely as hobby projects, and might not have even had an ambition of making serious money out of it, and as such there's no reason to be hostile to the community.
Then a VC fund gives these developers a dumptruck full of money and expect returns immediately afterward. Something like Postman likely doesn't make a ton of money unless they're doing something anti-consumer like selling data.
sign in, you mean.
sign away means getting rid of vcs.
I understood it as giving it up, not getting rid of. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Give+It+Away
I read that as "sign your allegiances away from their current counterparts (e.g. the user) and towards the VCs instead".
When Postman started becoming shit, I started using Insomnia, which is also turning into shit now.
I heard Bruno is good, but haven’t used it. Apparently everything is in a file, which is an appreciable idea.
I've been using Bruno for a couple of years, there are some rough edges but overall it's very good.
Been using Bruno. It’s good, only complaint is it has some dark mode quirks.
I switched to Bruno, it's pretty nice, no complaints.
Good thing is that we can start using Insomnium now.
It is unmaintained.
This is the cost of devs focusing on corporate gains and not their craft.
Devs have to eat and if someone offers you a life altering amount of money to work on their hobby project, a lot of them would probably take it. It's hard to turn down something that might assure your family a comfortable life.
That's all good, and I hope they're happy, but they shouldn't expect their audience to stick around if they start to ruin the project that got them there.
Why you and other devs say Insomnia is unmaintained?
There has been a release in september, issues has been solved within last month, and multiple pull requests has been managed (merged and rejected) also recently.
Maybe you refer to issues specific to a platform? Thanks in advance.
I want to judge the devs for it but if a VC walked up to me with a bag full of cash and the opportunity to work full time on a passion project I can’t be anywhere near sure I’d say no.
That bag full of cash will keep being a bag full of cash but the passion project will likely become driven by whoever hands you the bag and will head towards their goals, not yours. Anyway you'll keep the cash. It's not different from what the vast majority of us do with our jobs every day.
Do you apply the same logic to your plumber? Your accountant? The 'craft' is something you do for customers in order to make money to eat.
The plumber doesn't start to install additional pipes that require an annual fee, or spying on me "because you know, nothing to hide", or any other nonsense we are seeing in software.
Which is why plumbers don't get VC money and salaries aren't as high.
One of the things I've thought about for startups are things with the general theme of "complete control over your data", how could I write something like this into the articles of incorporation (or similar) to make some of those values at least somewhat irrevocable?
https://www.usebruno.com/
If you're on macOS, try Paw/RapidAPI https://paw.cloud They may be affected by AWS.
This is one of many reasons why I prefer curl[0] and a bit of shell scripting. With this approach there is no dependency on a vendor's servers.
0 - https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html
OK which dumb engineer unsafely wrapped the entire feature flagging / observability / telemetry tooling around the main process of the app such that it wouldn't load unless those libraries resolved?
I'm looking at alternatives that are guarantee to work locally and only found the following:
Posting.sh -> Postman imports are experimental which makes it a non-starter for people like myself with large Postman collections. TUI only also makes it harder to switch.
Insomnia -> Owned by another large tech company.
Yaak -> Made by the same guy who created AND SOLD Insomnia above. Not exactly comforting to switch over for. How long till this one also gets sold?
Any other great local tools out there? I would like to be done with Postman.
There’s also Bruno!
« Offline only - We take security and privacy seriously. Bruno is an offline tool and there is no syncing of your data to any cloud »
https://www.usebruno.com/
I'm one of the creators of Kreya [1]. We were one (or the) first to support a fully-offline, git-centric local data storage in this space.
Kreya is privacy-first since its first commit five years ago, since we were fed up with Postman and Insomnia. Happy to answer any questions
[1] https://kreya.app
I use a simple bash script:
used like: I know it doesn't have the functionality of postman, but this is how I build up interactions with a new API.We have moved all our stuff to Bruno nowadays.
The red flag appeared a few years ago already. My company forbade us to use it. This wan no problem for me, because I mostly use curl, but people got upset. We thought this too much restrictive, but ...
I'm using an old version of Postman with their servers blocked through the system hosts file. I keep meaning to migrate to whatever the next best thing is but this setup just works for me.
I moved from Postman to RapidAPI when Postman tried to get me to sign up for their cloud service just migrate my data to a new laptop.
Stop using Postman and its ilk. Use .http files.
I feel bad for the engineering team that has to implement it all this way. Hang in there folks.
Bruno is quite good with postman compatibility and it's own syntax
I migrated to insomnia.rest when postman required logging in for basic functionality.
Hello all,
Postman founder here. I did not time this with an AWS outage of this magnitude but I posted about filesystem, git, and offline support coming to Postman last week: https://x.com/a85/status/1978979495836356819?s=46
Postman has a lot of capabilities now that require the cloud but there is still an offline client built in just for requests.
Building sign-in and cloud features were not due to a VC-led conspiracy. A large number of companies depend on APIs (like AWS) and have thousands of services and APIs. Customers need to manage them and wanted us to build it.
Please can you address the claim that Postman is silently leaking customer secrets to your servers as part of telemetry?
https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...
Yes. The post is misleading and we have more detail on what we do here.
https://blog.postman.com/engineering/postman-free-is-secure-...
Postman allows for turning off history, keeping variables local, setting up a local vault all in the free product and in more advanced plans, there are secret scanning capabilities for IT and security teams.
https://blog.postman.com/choose-the-right-postman-plan-for-y...
These issues are not unique to Postman and apply to all cloud products like GitHub as an instance. Products that are “offline” just shift the burden to the user.
This makes me feel more justified in using Posting in my terminal these days.
I ditched Postman for Insomnia (Open source) after Postman refused to adhere to customers to disable auto-updates for 6 years+. I checked on their GitHub issue tracker and it turns out, the solution was to upgrade to their "Enterprise plan".
https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/69...
So, I said fuck it and switched to a real, open source alternative, Insomnia, instead:
https://insomnia.rest
It connects to their servers when it starts up; have to assume their server is down. It used to be so much nicer before they added this "feature".
Don't you love how slimeballs cant help themselves though? Instead of just letting free and easy happen the one time a year they go down... they just spit in everyones face to remind them now they have time to go find an alternative
just use curl
Yeah I was pretty damn mad when I opened postman and it was completely unusable. Can safely say I'm done with it now.
maybe it doesn't do everything postman does, but I'm very happy using the rest client extension in vs code, the http files with the api calls are commited to the source code repository along with the code is easy to use, does what i need, and is easy to share with my colleagues.
How many other offline and online things failed unexpectedly due to the aws outage?
I will phase out this tool, definely
But why does the app stop working if telemetry can't be sent? Who engineered this?
In the beginning, there was Postman, and we used it, and it was good. Then, Postman became enshittified, so we switched to Insomnia. Then, Insomnia became enshittified, so we switched to Bruno. Then, Bruno became enshittified, so now it's Yaak.
Let's see how long it takes for one of these programs to break the cycle.
And each of those are just thin wrappers around curl I guess. We should be glad that some good free software could be produced in the past to serve as the foundation for today's greed.
Postman is absolutely shit since it was sold. Stop using it.
Happy with https://yaak.app/so far
Hey, I'm the creator of Yaak! Let me know how it could be even better :)
I'm stealing your thread to ask a question: How would you explain what an API Client is to someone who's never used one before, and has always just consumed/produced/tested API's the old-fashioned way?
Is it basically "an IDE for playing with API's"?
Is it only for HTTP-based API's?
Does it come with canned functionality for popular services out there?
I read this but still don't feel like I fully understand what it does https://www.postman.com/api-platform/api-client/
EDIT: This blog post https://schier.co/blog/call-for-beta-testers made it click a little better: "...app that makes testing REST APIs super easy"
Do you have any plans for scripting?
Flatpak and snap please
It's a bit lower on the priority list, but it'll get there https://feedback.yaak.app/p/flatpak-and-flathub
Don’t encourage snap.
Umm, just wondering why you never unplugged it from the internet for a few days(or forever)?
Mine used to be all local too, but then it required me to login online in order to work.
But mine is still working locally now. If it stops working locally, what even is the point anymore?
I am against government regulation, but at times likes this (or your sous vide and washing machine requiring online accounts to function) the idea for regulations that mandate availability of local server for client server applications is alluring. And making all cloud functionality optional.
Or just use an alternative, and there are plenty of them in that segment, no need for the legislator to do anything here.
just use bruno+git https://www.usebruno.com/
I switched to Insomnia, seems not as bloated for my use-case.
Isomnium is even better, although it's been archived.
Just use cURL.
It will never disappear, enshittify, or let you down. It's already modern, and has a great UI. It's available everywhere. It supports every protocol and feature under the sun. Those fancy features you think you need: you don't. Whatever you're missing can be easily added via simple shell scripts or aliases.
Yeah they really turned their product into over-complicated garbage instead of focusing on doing one thing well.
It’s annoying that the marketing and brand recognition has worked so well. My whole company uses postman and it’s a huge uphill battle to use anything else.
There are SO many alternatives. It’s curl UI wrapper with secrets* management! Why do we all need enterprise licenses??
*and the secrets were all exposed in logs!!
Enshittification, happens to every venture or private equity backed business
That is true of many software companies these days.
Off-Topic: I read about yaak app as an alternative to Postman - can anyone recommend an alternative to Stoplight Studio for covering "the other side" by any means?
I loved to use their free desktop app for building API documentations which can be used for scaffolding / generating APIs but for some reason I don't remember right now I had to stop using it.