HN

Comments (236)

• Menu

  pants2
  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
• Menu

  senfiaj
  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.
• Menu

  bottombutton
  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.
• Menu

  dham
  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.
• CommonGuy
  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
• Menu

  georgel
  Postman went from a great lightweight tool to a bloated up-selling mess.
• unkn0wn_root
  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
• Menu

  dvtkrlbs
  I've been using Yaak [1] for a while. It is a breath of fresh air.[1] https://yaak.app/
• Menu

  ediamondscience
  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?
• eddieroger
  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.
• firefoxd
  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".
• leftnode
  Man it really sucks because Postman's scripting, automation, and sharing features are nice.
• schleck8
  Wow this is badCircumvention of the trust model of the agent harnesses (the hash), prompt injection and silently registering an outbound remote MCP endpoint
• Menu

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

  Waterluvian
  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.
• closetheloopdev
  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.
• neya
  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).
• Menu

  rurp
  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.
• taosx
  "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)
• sitzkrieg
  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
• Menu

  fergie
  It was never, ever clear to me why you needed to use Postman instead of Curl
• rienbdj
  Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.
• Menu

  bitbasher
  Would you be willing to pay for a local only postman alternative if it was built by hand and native (no electron)?
• neoyagami
  Welp, time to vibecode an non cloud version :/
• itsafarqueue
  There are few apps more amenable to one shotting with your ai sub than postman et al
• Colegno
  I really don't see the point of Postman. It used to be light and efficient, now it's bloated and inefficient
• theseamusjames
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• igleria
  The old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be...
• donmb
  We left Postman long time ago and only use Bruno.
• stillpointlab
  If there ever was a tool that could be vibe coded, a postman-like is the one.
• anon
  undefined
• throw03172019
  Postman was amazing 6-8 years ago. What a downfall it’s been.
• Sparkyte
  We are in the new era of provider malware. GREEEAAAAT! Thanks AI!
• clickety_clack
  I haven’t used postman for years and I don’t know why anyone would. Are people really paying for it?
• Menu

  mococa
  I miss the native macOS app Paw
• maxdo
  This is their very bad attempt to survive , who need this in the age of agents ?
• p0w3n3d
  Curl Web Interface shouldn't require any payment at all
• arttaboi
  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).
• IlikeMadison
  Use impostman.el/verb.el/restclient.el in Emacs.
• system2
  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.
• Havoc
  If even half of that is true then they’re cooked
• Menu

  richwater
  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/)
• vachina
  Thanks, I still use Postman out of muscle memory. Will use Bruno or Insomnia (as recommended here)
• O3marchnative
  At least it has never been easier to transition to another tool or to make your own.
• plagiarist
  Unsurprising. I loved the tool but it was obviously time to drop it when they began pushing for logins.
• cglan
  This happened to me. Holy fuck I was pissed
• ebtebt
  Thank you for the reminder, I had not deleted Postman yet. Done :D
• tty456
  Part of Postman's ongoing enshittification...
• languagehacker
  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.
• dsschnau
  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.
• skilning
  Enshittification wins again. :(
• Menu

  orphereus
  Does everything have to go to shit when money is involved?
• moi2388
  Thank god we moved to Bruno and sometimes just http files in vs code or jetbrains
• EmX_3000
  [dead]
• fletchowns
  [dead]
• twistorlabs
  [flagged]
• ag3ntsc4rn
  [dead]
• PhaseTwobig
  [dead]
• canpolatkaya4
  [flagged]
• Menu

  Surac
  who the hell needs that. skills are just md files