Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

Insomnia didn't need any configuration at all, and the UI is so much less bloated and confusing

I'm looking to switch, but the ties to Kong make me nervous investing in the platform. Presumably because they might eventually make it always for-pay and/or focus on more enterprise-y features that I'm not interested in.

I would love to hear what others think.

Thanks to gschier and the Insomnia team for simplifying my team's life.

It doesn't seem to do all the things I am using Postman for.

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

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

For the past decade a number products rode the free software love boat, the gambit was to get organic community love and free marketing and hope that it somehow translates into VC endorsed financial rewards. This does not seem to be working out as expected.

Why? Shouldn't the price of software be determined by the equilibrium of supply and demand? Or are you suggesting there's far more demand than supply?

But, I think there's a massive amount of opacity and sneakiness in SaaS pricing. If you read Postman's announcement post yesterday, you easily could've walked away expecting just a 50% price increase when in reality you may have been getting bumped from $8/user/mo. to $24/user/mo. because of the new rate limits.

Companies should charge more, but they should defend the merits of those decisions, not try to slip them under the rug.

Edit: also, I'm not sure your claim that software is getting less expensive holds up. I can say for sure that business software has significantly outpaced inflation in its price increases, but our research on this didn't cover consumer: https://capiche.com/e/software-inflation-rate

In the pre-app store days it was incredibly difficult to make a business selling software if you weren't one of the very large players.

Having said that, to address-

"Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages"

-this would be fair retort if it was a new service charging {X}. If it isn't, the counter-argument is that they were undercharging to prevent competitors from making money / paying good wages.

I'm neither here nor there on this, but it certainly isn't a moral thing that you're holding it as. People are annoyed that they're going to have to pay more for less. Eh.

People do have non-financial motivations for developing software (accessibility improvements, creating community value, solving their own personal challenges or problems).

If you think this trend is going to change, I'd suspect (but can't guarantee of course) that you might be mistaken. Costs are going to continue to reduce, and software is going to continue to be easier to build, distribute and replicate; meanwhile new generations of developers will continue to expand the pool of participants in our software communities.

There are huge parts of the world now coming online which will simply not want (or be able) to pay the kind of salaries or fees that enterprises and software developers have been accustomed to receiving for their services.

Is it unreasonable to expect good software for low cost (or even free) if we have ample people, motivation, and ability to produce it, and if we enjoy a worldwide net benefit from it as a result?

The way I'd rephrase the situation is: how are investors and enterprise incumbents going to adjust if this trend continues, and what's a good way to ensure that as an individual you can participate and thrive in a world if this continues to happen.

A hint/suggestion from my biased opinion is that social safety nets are important, and nations that provide those for their communities will free up developers and resources to build the software and services that everyone really needs, rather than having developers spend their time on (yes high-paid, yes comfortable -- but broadly beneficial towards executives-and-investor class rather than community or nation) work.

People should use Postman if the premium price is worth it to them over Insomnia, Postwoman, etc, not out of some sense of obligation. A business full of expensive developers is not a charity.

Hard disagree with absolutely all of this.

All people need unions, literally every human on earth deserves a union. If you work for anyone, anywhere, doing anything, you deserve a union. Any employee without a union is in an inherently unfair position, and is being taken advantage of.

Software should be cheap. Software should be as low cost as possible, without committing some sort of evil (sacrificing quality or working conditions or polluting, etc).

And a major goal of all humanity should be to drive the cost of all things as close to $0 as possible, without hurting anyone or doing anything unethical. We should be intentionally aiming for zero scarcity in all things, that's what progress is.

Making software some sort of expensive luxury that only certain people can afford is terrible, and that logic being applied to everything (from housing, to education, to healthcare and more) is the biggest problem in society today.

Companies have obligations to build real businesses & products that are based on realistic & solid plans from day 1. And they need to adjust those plans when things change, but by building a real company from day 1, those changes should be realistic and measured.

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

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

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

The primary value add is the ability to organize groups of related requests and then run them as part of a test suite and assert against the outcomes. It's essentially a test tool for REST APIs that's accessible to a less technical audience.

I don't see why I should be billed annually for using a managed HTTP client. Given that, Paw sounds better equipped for my personal API development needs all for a one time payment.

I’d really like to see something similar in Windows.