Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurensr | Hacker News Reader

What is it with generic HTTP clients and their data/account hunger? And why has no fully selfhosted team collaboration tool stood up?

View on HN

Because they raised millions of dollars and it turns out most companies aren’t paying for enterprise licenses for what is essentially a UI wrapper on top of curl.

There are open source projects (like insomnia) that are “good enough”. I think it is a symptom of all of the free money in the past few years where SAAS companies were just buying each others products. Now that the money is drying up, companies need to continue to hit these insane ARR targets somehow.

Id say marketing. What this episode has shown me, is that there are actually loads such clients. Many of them look kind of similar (in a good way), and provide much of the same functionality.

I’m also a bit baffled. What’s so hard about curl with a UI? Why are there multiple entire companies in this space? I mean, competition is great and all, but these two at least look in a race to the bottom.

At my company I started building an app to do api calls to our own api. It’s basically specialised version of Insomnia/Postman, because BOTH of them managed to screw my configuration. And you are right: it’s nothing insanely hard. Granted - a more general purpose version would be a bit more tricky due to the need of handling special cases, but it is nothing too difficult.

Data/account hunger is how you get money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com