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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

I love Insomnia and use it almost daily and in the hope the developers/owners are reading here on Hacker News: Please don't make the same mistake as Postman. I used Postman years ago until it shifted from being a simple tool to test and develop REST Apis to something now called "Cloud Collaboration Platform", got way to much bloat and tries to nudge me (or maybe even made it mandatory in the meantime?) into creating a user account etc.

Please don't take Insomnia down that path, and make all enterprise/collab/cloud feature optional while still focusing on the single-user, simple to use and setup program it has been so far.

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We're extremely aware of what has made Insomnia successful over the last five years and we want to keep applying the same principles going forward. This is a big reason why we're keeping the existing Insomnia application (now named Core) as a separate, standalone app. Simplicity, focus, and usability are key.

Thank you so much for that attitude and I have to add: I'd definetely spend money on a license if there a pro/everyday-user features that make it worth it, while having a free version so that others in the team can still collaborate and use my output/exports. I'd often find it hard to convince teams or new users with which I collaborate to convince to spend money on a tool upfront just so they can collab with me. But if its only additional/pro features, that won't be an issue.

I gave the designer a quick try and it seems there are issues with importing OAS 3/yaml APIs making heavy use of $ref and multiple files, but I will dig deeper into this in the next days and open a bug report if needed.

We're tracking that on GitHub. Feel free to follow along or submit additional details :) https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/2082

It sounds like you are the creator/a team member, so I just wanted to give you a data point.

My team used insomnia for a while. We were on the paid tier. My boss had us bail because of pain points we were having with syncing environments. People were overwriting changes on accident, and it was hard to coordinate.

I like Insomnia more than what we have now, but I wanted to let you know that was the pain point that lost you some customers so you can hopefully address that to avoid losing future customers. :-/

I think something like a "locking" feature or the ability to prevent certain users from modifying certain shared environments would have helped.

We currently have a new sync system in beta that works more like Git, making it easier to control what is shared and when. https://support.insomnia.rest/article/67-version-control

Personally I think it's a lost opportunity that you're still not allowing people to save the configuration in the project they're working on.

We switched to first vscode rest client and now the intellij embedded one at this point, as having the calls saved in clear text makes it possible to just have a request directory directly in the Repository... With transparent reviews etc.

Exporting/importing is just way too troublesome.

Can it use an exportable/importable file as source of truth which you can then check into git?

Yes, many teams use the import/export feature to do exactly this.

This is one of the key reasons we didn't build this functionality into Insomnia and instead released a separate application.

Users love our products for their simplicity and the streamlined nature and we fully intend to keep that essence going forward.

Thank you! I understand that from a company valuation/investor perspective it's important to have enterprise features and cloud collaboration / account sign up nonsense. But too many simple tools have gone down that path and ended up becoming bloated and frustrating. Dropbox is a big offender here too IMO.

Thank you. For both the tools you make and this reply explaining your reasoning on this one.

It is really refreshing to see someone explaining their simple first-principle reasoning on something as controversial as this, and that specific decision working out great for the users.

Far too often we see a major industry player doing something drastic that users dislike (e.g., Postman bloat situation), and the competitors simply following the suit because "our competitors are big and smart, so it must be a good change that we should follow as well".

Luckily it is open source https://github.com/Kong/insomnia so if something like that happens, a community KISS fork is possible.

I'm a big Insomnia fan and always recommend it over Postman as it's simple to use. Although even it feel a bit to "modern UI like" to me. I'd really love a old fashioned win 95 UI for this kind of thing. Tortoise git for example is my idea of a nice UI for a tool.

You could try Fiddler; it has a huge feature set along with an old-school UI: https://www.telerik.com/fiddler

While we are giving tips, sometimes all you need is the fetch() api in F12 in your favourite browser. And the good think about using that is you then remember the api better for when you are programming again. I've done this before for simple jobs.

Isn't fiddler intended to be used to capture requests sent from already running apps and not to make standalone requests to APIs? Additionally it is not multi-platform as far as I know, you can only run it on Windows machines.

I've ran it on Linux few years ago. It's a .NET app and it wasn't too hard to make it run with Mono.

I've used Fiddler both for capturing existing requests as well as firing off my own to test an API :) You can create one from scratch or modify one that was previously captured (the latter being really handy for dealing with auth and large payloads).

Re xplat: they recently announced a cross-platform beta that will replace the Windows-only one in the long-term; I haven't tried it myself though.

Lucky for you, I'm a windows 98 kind of guy, i've been thinking about doing a custom theme for a while ;))

I really wish I had the slackmoji of Ballmer pumped right now

I use Postman daily and I have never created an account. I think it only nags you when you start the app for the first time. I just import/export my collections to the git repo of the API I am working at.

Sure, the whole cloud login, team synchronization stuff is totally useless for me, but it is not mandatory. Anyway I can understand why it may be frustrating to see all this bloat.

On the other hand I found that Insomnia lacks a few features that Postman has. For example there is no way to do scripting in Insomnia, there only is request chaining which is IMHO way more limiting than the Javascript sandbox that Postman provides. Most notably there is no way to generate request data on the fly.

I think there are a few plugins that provide that functionality, would love to chat more about the use-case to see what we could do in the future for things like this.

feel free to email - nijiko@konghq.com

I had asked a similar question before, and I think this ^ is exactly why they built Designer and Insomnia Core (the original) as separate products. Freedom of choice ftw!

Can't stress this enough!

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