Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsjq | Hacker News Reader

gradually start tightening the noose on the free tier. enterprises would be forced to pay.

What eventually will happen is that someone will get fed up and build an open-source alternative on Github. Rinse, repeat.

Insomnia is already pretty good. Other alternatives are also present that cater to basic usage (most of them as browser plugins).

Can vouch for insomnia, have been using it for a long time now and it's been great.

In-somnia is in-credible... And allowing import from postman collections means I've never once looked back.

Postman is quickly trending towards bloatware, where _most_ people just want it for is for a GUI for curl and to share APIs across teams, but Postman becomes more and more bloated with "enterprise" features to justify valuations, while losing focus on the core demo that first adopted it!

[1]: https://insomnia.rest/ (hattip for the domain name as well ;) )

They did their is insomnia iirc and another one. And script friendly stuff like httpie. And ide stuff like httpclient. That's stupidly high valuation

Holy shit I thought the valuation was stupidly high at 225m, now Ive reread 5.6b, that's more than fastly market cap ffs insanity

The space is already crowded, though (many of them being open source), for example Insomnia, Paw, Fiddler, Hoppscotch, and even Thunder Client (a VS Code extension). I suspect that the Postman investors are privy to information that warrant the investment (plus the economic climate being what it is).

Charles proxy too (paid)

There are already quite a few, a JavaFX for those with Electron allergy and there are VSCode plugins for the Electron lovers.

For the rest of us there is curl and Powershell Web-Request.

It's a GUI around curl commands. Any enterprise company could trivially spin up a team to build an open source tool that does 80 percent of its use cases.

> Any enterprise company could

And yet...don't?

Company i used to work for just hired a few part-time interns to build and maintain a custom version of Postman. Auto-generated web-forms based on the underlying service code. Then would offer those interns full time jobs on graduation and hire new interns to continue maintaining the project (with any ex-intern full-timers able to jump in and/or advice as needed).

"Its just X around Y" is actually a very common multi-billion dollar solution/business.

> could trivially spin up a team

Or they could trivially pay for a 100% solution w/o having to lose focus on what they actually do.

Is there not already a 100% open source solution? This is one of those cases where a good dev could likely build a clone in a month. And it hardly needs constant updates.

> where a good dev could likely build a clone in a month. And it hardly needs constant updates.

I wish I had $5 / user / yr for every person who says this about products!

Kidding aside, I think this dramatically underestimates what it takes to build a product that solves the problems that Postman solves.

"Curl has no gui" isn't the problem they're solving.

> I wish I had $5 / user / yr for every person who says this about products!

Yeah I'm getting Show HN: Dropbox thread vibes from this thread lol.

We need a "common business misconceptions for HN engineers" sticky!

Your posts are incredibly condescending. If you could at least make some effort to explain your thoughts, at least you'd be adding something to the conversation.

Maybe I'm using postman wrong? Besides saving data, what is there to scale? And even saving data is likely a minor point for many who use this, they could export their routes in some way.

Obviously dropbox has a sharing problem to solve, but I honestly don't see what your post adds to the discussion. Perhaps you could enlighten me to the problem that Postman is solving?

I mean, I have no idea how you use it, but I doubt you're "using it wrong". You're just not everyone or every use case.

Expanding on that, just because you don't understand what problem it solves, why people would want to pay for it, or why VC's believe they can profitably invest at a given valuation, doesn't meant that any of them are wrong.

It just means you don't understand from someone else's perspective. So when you say "This is one of those cases where a good dev could likely build a clone in a month. And it hardly needs constant updates." - it's coming from a place of ignorance to the other people's problems and their scope.

> Perhaps you could enlighten me to the problem that Postman is solving?

A quick glance at their homepage helps with this. "Build APIs together" and then the value props go on with "Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster."

So Postman is about the collaboration and process of building APIs. Not about a curl gui. That's an expensive, big, valuable problem space.

Obligatory response to "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially" comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It's a socially-networked gui around curl commands! I need to dig up the quotes, but in Bruce Sterling's sci fi book Heavy Weather, he says that no one pays for sotware, except groupwere, which everyone begrudgingly pays out for.

I gotta say though I am super unimpressed by the Postman team's ability to prioritize / do the right things. Basic capabilities likes SOCKS proxies or proxies DNS are just totally awol, making this tool practically useless in a wide variety of everyday development circumstances. Ticket's been open 6 years now[1]. Really not that hard to add, would make such a powerful difference.

[1] https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/13...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com