It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.

I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore

Postman logs detailed information on every single API request you make through its tool, including query parameters. If you use the templating syntax `{{some_secret}}` to fill in a query parameter, it sends the actual secret content of `some_secret` to Postman's servers. If you disable outgoing network traffic to this logging endpoint, the entire app will stop working properly.

I discovered this when investigating whether Postman is HIPAA-compliant (it is not).

Who still uses Postman? In my experience it became insanely slow and bloated. Switched to Bruno. IMO, Postman is like uTorrent, everybody heard about it and many install because of inertia.

Working in healthcare, and Postman got decertified by our Cyber team for this. We all switched to Bruno overnight. Their sales team is pinging us like gangbusters though.

We went to bruno years ago and has been good. Nice to be able to store the request definitions in git. But to be honest, don't really need any of these tools anymore.

What do you think will happen next to every SaaS that was pumped and hasn't exited?

Good to wonder what will happen to every SaaS or every company that has many users it can't monetize any longer.

I have been building Kreya [1] for over 6 years now as a Postman alternative. It's offline-first and privacy focused with a storage format made for git.

In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...

[1] https://kreya.app

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

If anyone is interested in a Postman alternative but likes TUIs and leans more toward using .http files, check out resterm[0].

btw - I'm the author.

[0]https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm

I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today. The best version of it was just a logger and a formatter on top of an http client. The proto import was nice for gRPC. Who thought that relatively simple tool needed accounts and MCPs and whatever else they've thrown into it?

I've been using Yaak [1] for a while. It is a breath of fresh air.

[1] https://yaak.app/

Postman management is something else. I remember a few years ago, once they had that VC money, they made it so you had to log/pushed you to. funny, considering it's basically a GUI for curl and then they spent a ton of money on some party with famous singers or something.

A bit sad, but I guess that’s the new normal.

Wow this is bad

Circumvention of the trust model of the agent harnesses (the hash), prompt injection and silently registering an outbound remote MCP endpoint

When they started uploading things to the server and requiring you to have an account to access the things that they STOLE from your machine without authorization in first place, I uninstall it...

What can go wrong by uploading your things, if you had any passwords or users there that "pinky promise" will not be uploaded, then running AI and maybe oops have a leak and now someone is hitting your production servers?

Lots of discussion about less terrible alternatives to postman. For those already using a Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well. I haven't used it for anything too complicated, but for routine stuff where you need to hit an endpoint and fiddle with the payload and headers it's great.

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

Postman was my curl with a gui. Used it everywhere, recommended it everywhere. But one day out of the blue it asks me to login, and it all went downhill from there. Imagine you had to login to use curl?

Anyway, I'm sure somewhere in some terms and conditions I agreed to, it says "we own the glass".

Many, many years ago, I used Postman for the first time, way back when it was a Chrome plugin. As an iOS dev, it was amazing to be able to validate the requests I needed to make outside the context of my code to validate things worked. Until, one day, I wasn't seeing something iterate in the responses I was getting as I expected to. Many cmd+R presses later, I talked to the API team to check logs, and we found that Postman was caching what should have been independent requests. Easily blamed on Chrome at the time, but it was an undocumented and unexpected behavior by Postman, who really should have better handled making each request unique.

I didn't need another reason not to use Postman, but I'll take it. Shame on them for moving in shadows.

I replaced that garbage with Insomnia years back. I’m just waiting until I hear that Insomnia is also a problem and where to go next.

postman has been malware since the day they added accounts many years ago. luckily only low skill cli fearing developers mostly gravitated to it, esp anytime in the past decade

Wow, the timing is perfect, I was going to post about this. I also found out last night that they actually proxy your requests without your permission. I have setup an exclusion within my firewall for certain request parameters, but it kept getting blocked despite all my settings a though it was going through their server. That really pissed me off since these requests actually contain sensitive data they did not have permission to intercept.

Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).

I think if you're using Postman, you don't care about sharing your data with random other people/companies on the intarwebs.

With AI agents at our disposal, can we not just have them code up something we need to use instead of using such sketchy apps like Postman?

It'd be a personal dev app where only features we need are implemented, including features only we (and no one else) need.

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.".

I dropped them when they first started forcing you to have an account and from them only used it when work made it mandatory, in some cases we even dropped them for other alternatives (http with source in git, scripts..etc)

Postman really should have known better who their customers are.

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

Man it really sucks because Postman's scripting, automation, and sharing features are nice.

Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.

Would you be willing to pay for a local only postman alternative if it was built by hand and native (no electron)?

It was never, ever clear to me why you needed to use Postman instead of Curl

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

Welp, time to vibecode an non cloud version :/

If there's ever been a perfect app to vibecode your own replacement, it's postman. Claude can knock out a completely usable competitor in under an hour, I'm sure of it. A day of tweaking and you'll have everything you need.

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

We left Postman long time ago and only use Bruno.

There are few apps more amenable to one shotting with your ai sub than postman et al

The old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be...

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

We are in the new era of provider malware. GREEEAAAAT! Thanks AI!

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

Never liked Postman since they started forcing everyone to signup. Sometimes I hate VCs who unnecessarily funds and ruins a perfectly fine product (of course founders are equally guilty).

Curl Web Interface shouldn't require any payment at all

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

I miss the native macOS app Paw

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

At this point, with coding agents, it would be stupid to waste time with Postman. I already uninstalled it after using it for over a decade. Build your own simple tools for debugging, my friends. The old archaic era is over.

Postman went from a nice tool to an almost virus in just a few years. It's crazy that anyone still uses it.

I'm currently using Bruno (https://www.usebruno.com/)

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

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

At least it has never been easier to transition to another tool or to make your own.

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

This happened to me. Holy fuck I was pissed

I've always kind of thought that Postman was an enshittification story waiting to happen. I've always felt like they prey on people who just aren't comfortable with the command line, and so there isn't much more stooping lower for them than something like this.

Part of Postman's ongoing enshittification...

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

Enshittification wins again. :(

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

I'm glad to find out from this comment section that I'm not the only one who has noticed Postman is the poster-child of Enshittification.

who the hell needs that. skills are just md files