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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I find interesting on how on a startup related forum, anything related with not paying is always celebrated.

Generating revenue through the creation of value via innovation is great; using dark ux patterns to extract revenue from a captive user base, not so much.

I think in cases like postman, people don’t like when features they previously had used for free suddenly comes with a price tag; rather than innovate and create new value that is worth paying for, some companies are opting to take away features user previously had. Yes, they own/control the software and want to make money , which fine, but they created a dissatisfying user experience as they tried to coercively move users into their cloud offering, wether they wanted to or not, and regardless if it provided user value. After they did that, they shouldn’t be surprise a portion of their user base decide to ditch the product and complain about the experience. This is compounded by the fact that they leveraged the contributions of an open source community, and at the same time there are other options freely available that aren’t locked into a proprietary cloud login.

There is no universe where I see myself paying for postman. It was a bloated, hobbling mess that is now a chundering monster that has to somehow make money to satisfy VCs who invested in a glorified cURL interface and have to stuff it with features to try and entice enterprises. It is everything wrong with software and I welcome any lightweight alternatives

This. The UI was one of the most appalling, unintuitive messes I've ever encountered on any software product.

The game was up for Postman when I realised I could replicate all its functionality I needed by asking ChatGPT to write me some Perl scripts that made heavy use of LWP.

Once CEO asked me: "why are you spending months of your valuable time to create a tool to solve a thing, instead paying $10/month?"

"I know developers never pay, but why?"

It's not the money, it's the control you relinquish in the process. The potential costs of the risks involved are much, much greater than $10/month.

This. Proprietary software tends to be very inflexible, often low quality, and difficult to integrate. Fighting with these often causes more work than just doing from scratch or adapting open source code.

In my case it’s because companies would rather waste 6 months of person-hours than get out the credit card

For a lot of people, it's "Why pay $10/ month for something marginally more useful than a folder of bash files?"

People who spend months of their time building open source represent a fraction of developers who "never pay".

Why pay when there is a free, open and, if need arises, hackable alternatives ?

Developers do pay when there is value is. See how profitable cloud hosting is!

Startups are often all about disrupting an industry by lowering the cost of a product. If you can lower it to zero that demonstrates the incumbent businesses are obviously not providing a valuable service that's worth paying for.

Your comment does not make sense. If someone offers a service for free and people start to use it does not mean that the old incumbent service which costs money is not providing value. It shows both provide value as people were using both. It just shows that people prefer free over paid for the same service.

The new entrant maybe has lower internal costs or subsidises the price initially, but it does not mean that one provides more value than the other.

In the Bruno case, it sounds nice with open-source, free for the basic features etc, but it's not much different than any other freemium offering. They will also try to make money on premium features and other related tools. Their own development time will be spent on those features and they will outsource a lot of the development of the base tool on the open source community.

I can only speak for me, but I come here for the hacker news part, not the ycombinator part.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them."

Being non-free is a defect that can always be improved, best technology is always free and something you don't need to think to use.

I wonder what techonolgy you have at home without paying a dime to actually access it.

Here's the first thing I saw in my room right now: a book about drawing. From it, I learned a simple method of making my art easier to parse visually.

I paid for a physical copy of an explanation of the method; now I'm free to use the method in my drawings or share it with other people.

Great to see most people are smart enough to not apply same model on all problems in their life.

Productivity tools better to be lean, simple, free & open source in some cases. This is one of those.

Of course, you can keep throwing money at bulky software continuously making things slower and more complicated, just because you never have to worry about money thanks to the VC money. I’m old enough to not buy that this is how startups operate in general though.

https://www.usebruno.com/pricing

Bruno is not free. It has a free version, but you can pay to have more features.

The pay plan is "pre-order", the features don't exist yet.

I think one issue is that in organizations it takes effort to get new paid software approved and start paying for those. Even if the money is very small. Like engineer that costs $80-150k/y needs couple of tools that cost €50-100/y piece.

Usually in organization it is much easier to just increase the spend on already approved vendors. Increase the AWS spend by $50/year? Nobody is going to ask you about it. Or start using some tool that does not involve payments - nobody even knows you are using it.

It would be great if we could change that. A world where independent software developers could make a decent living by selling small quality tools would be a better place.

I just bought a bruno license. Not paying isn't why I like bruno and dislike Postman.

We have all been fucked over by VC management, especially from YC-funded product bloat and rot. Free means it will not get worse by the developers adding micro transactions and subscriptions.

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