What happens when an HTTP client raises $225M at a $5.6B valuation | Hacker News Reader

What happens when an HTTP client raises $225M at a $5.6B valuation

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111 pointsbundie74 comments

Postman inhabits this weird niche where it was tons of value when it was free, and now it's wildly not worth the price. The only thing keeping us on Postman was inertia, which this year's invoice has finally sprung us out of, and we're switching to Bruno.

I worry that Bruno will go the same way, as that's also what Insomnia did.

'hoppscotch' is another one doing stupid shit: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/pull/3266

Can't believe we almost switched to that to get away from Postman. At this point, I'd rather have a text file full of curl commands, because httpie looks about ready to spring an Enterprise tier as well.

And what is wrong with (a well-structured hierarchy of folders containing) text files (i.e. scripts) full of curl commands? You can also track and version them in git, automate them, etc.

Genuinely asking of course, because I never got the "point" of Postman vs. curl, except maybe for non-technical people.

A UI is much more discoverable than CLI arguments.

Skimmable perhaps, man pages exist even if people don't like to read them.

Is your argument that a man page is more discoverable than a UI?

I have had that experience, yes. Contrast poking around with PuTTY vs man ssh.

Man pages have prose, examples, 'see also' notes.

They surely could put some cheat sheets at the beginning but that doesn't excuse a resistance to reading them.

GUI is slightly nicer UI for many including myself if you need to iterate over things like parameters, headers, paths and even body data.

Curl is perfectly fine for some repeatable copy paste, but if you need to change bits by bits I feel GUI brings lot of benefits.

A folder of text files is what my team does, using https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

You should give Bruno a shot - https://www.usebruno.com/

Relevant HN thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39653718

Bruno is just another open core product using claims of open source for marketing, it seems.

> Majority of our features are free and open source (which covers REST and GraphQL Apis)

Try submitting a PR for websockets or GRPC support and see what happens.

4 thumbs down and a frown emoji are “too heated” and close the PR? What horrible way to handle things. Another one bites the dust…

If I was a hoppscotch user, I'd fork the project from this person's PR and never look back.

It's the circle of life.

It really feels something so simple that in the end mostly open source free tool done as hobby could do most of the functionality. Leveraging some existing open source tool...

And they do. There are a ton of clones.

Can you name them?

Insomnia, Hoppscotch, Bruno, HTTPie are a few.

I end up using it just because the team does. I much prefer curl for most things.

I do security stuff. So I get paid Burp License... So I just end up using that myself.

If I implement or integrate with something myself yeah I just do curl too. Or more complex case python.

A $5.6B valuation means that Postman is about as valuable as Reddit ($6.4B). There might be an alternative simulated universe in which this makes sense, but it is not ours. Unfortunately, the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent, so I won't short Postman if it will be listed sometime in the future, but damn, I would really like to do so.

Valuations are silly and comparing them apples-to-apples rarely makes that much sense. It's just some numbers on a paper, there's no real "value" there.

I saw this announcement in my email yesterday and thought to myself "I didn't know T-Pain was an API fan"

Between pricing, outages, and documentation, many usage of APIs do involve a lot of Pain.

My postman is Jupyter with the 'requests' module loaded.

So much this indeed!!! I really wonder how Postman users think that doing something in an UI instead of in code is adding value to their workflow.

Because I can set it up and share it with my team and quickly onboard new members to our REST API from any environment in less than a few buttons. Any setup needed is already in the pre request script field of the collection.

If I wanted to share different versions of the request I can do so via postman’s code tab.

I would say this adds tremendous value over a jupyter script.

For an http client that hasn’t be shittified to hell usebruno.com

What I miss the most is the request interceptor. Yes, I know I can copy requests/responses from my browser.

I know it's a separate tool, but HTTP Toolkit is great: https://httptoolkit.com/

download tool a,b,c,d,e,f or Postman and call it a day

tough decision

Before finding out about Bruno, I've used HTTPie or curl (curl mostly out of muscle memory, since HTTPie is really new to me), because of how atrocious the UX in Postman is now.

And this is coming from someone who generally prefers GUIs, and I even liked Postman a few years ago.

Right clicking, or installing an extra tool is much less friction than using Postman

yet

what’s wrong with curl again?

Nothing wrong with it, but I love having a GUI sometimes

At this point, this is worse than parody.

Straight out of (HBO) Silicon Valley

This is beautiful.

I had so much fun at Twilio signal the year that Tony hawk was there and OK GO played … Great open bar and fantastic catering.

I have no idea what postman is or what people use it for but what’s the point of living in the bay area in 2024 if you’re not taking advantage of this excess?

Will try to attend in May ...

To save you the click to Twitter, the post links to an announcement about Postman's "POST/CON 2024" conference:

https://www.postman.com/postcon/

"Celebrate at our after-party with a performance by six-time Grammy winner and multi-platinum recording artist T-Pain. Conference-goers will stroll to the historic August Hall to enjoy evening drinks, our own bowling alley, and an unforgettable live show."

And Postman describes themselves as:

"Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster." https://www.postman.com

So, I don't know. Enterprise sales gonna enterprise sell? It's part of the game...

> Enterprise sales gonna enterprise sell?

mate it's a tool to make http requests

Correction: It's an enterprise tool to make http requests. Would you be questioning OP this way if the tool was from Oracle? ;)

Maybe that's what it actually is, but this is the story they're selling to enterprise customers:

"simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration"

So I guess there's a bunch of API design platform stuff around the client app that they hope will lock in enterprise developers somehow.

We have multiple licenses for Postman at work. I saw this email and laughed. Doe they really need a con for postman?

I do like the client though. It makes it real easy to share REST api endpoints between teams.

Switched two years ago from Postman to Insomnia. Now Insomnia is also adding lots of logins and paid stuff and I am switching to Bruno. So far it seems great!

I use httpie from cli. It’s a much faster experience to call endpoints from a bash scripts.

Never got the postman hype.

I'm in HTTPain

> Connect with fellow API practitioners and global tech leaders

ahahahah

on the plus side, we should be grateful they're safely incinerating so much money from VCs - far far far worse companies could have got it and done far worse things than buying T-Pain a new Bentley.

"leaders" https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/leadership-is-a-hell-of-a-dr...

No wonder... 14$ month Basic, 29$ month Professional. 49$ (+49$)(+49$) month for Enterprise...

I'm poor and stingy so that sounds a lot. Specially when these sort of tools start to add up...

You’ll never go poor overestimating developer laziness.

I worked on a couple teams (contract - 3-6 months at a stretch), and teams had postman licenses for everyone - assuming it was some enterprise-type deal.

No developers used it. We all had access to it, but none used it (well, none did in the several months I was there). I guess some used it at some point, but it was primarily a tool some testers used, from what I could tell. Now... devs needed access to it to help answer questions from time to time, and I guess... 'using it' would be to put some new endpoint info in some collection, then grant access to it, but it wasn't anything helping out any developers day to day. But the companies paid for full licensing for everyone anyway - perhaps that's just easier in some sense? I guess that's the game?

I think the developer productivity tooling market exists at such high valuation because no one has really any useful metrics in that space.

I’ve worked in firms where we’ve bought into ideas that are absolutely based on cognitive dissonance - like the business cases across initiatives collectively achieving a >100% reduction in “inefficiencies”. That tells me at least some of those business cases are wrong but they’re all getting investment.

Tends to be a “biggest bullshitter wins” thing.

That valuation was in 2021. Wonder what it is now.

I'm not sure why you're all complaining. API is literally in T-Pain (3/5). I couldn't think of a better act.

What does postman even do?

Wrap curl around a GUI

Last I checked it was also an Electron app, so basically a web browser with network tools+.

I think I'm getting to be a crotchety old greybeard because I had the experience of being offered a Postman license at work only to say, "no thanks - curl does everything I need". Like it does have some nice convenience features and all that, but curl just does exactly what I need usually.

HTTPie does it better, though.

makes HTTP requests, with a lot of tooling around it. it's a nice idea, but (like almost everything) has been poisoned by a bunch of dumb venture capitalists driving a dumptruck of money up to the company and telling them to destroy the value the product provided.

Store simple text information (http requests method, uri, headers and content) in an obfuscated form (the json file for collections) that doesn't feel right to be put under version control, but that often needs to be.

Which is why I use IntellIJ's HTTP client.

Worse is Postman wants you to share collections on their SaaS thing that doesn't add any value to me over my Git host or my company's.

Yeah, the built in http client is 'good enough' for most needs I have. I posted another comment about the collection stuff I saw at some companies - tended to be used by testers to validate stuff, keep notes about their testing, etc. Perhaps that was some value for them and how they worked, but it was no value add for anyone on the dev teams I've worked on - it was basically ignored, even though we were paying for the seats.

A company pays an artist for a party? I don’t understand, what is awful?

This is the first thing that came to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYI957ge4c

I get that it’s funny and a bit ridiculous, what I don’t get is the reaction “that’s what a company valued a $Xb does, it’s awful”. And really, it’s just a company organizing a party with a famous (I guess?) artist.

What is seen as awful here?

That an HTTP client raised $225M at a $5.6B valuation.

Yeah, I think "awful" isn't the right word. Absurd, incongruous, or something else is probably more appropriate.

As a fellow API practitioner and API enthusiast, I love listening to T-Pain as I'm shredding it on the front-end.

I’m likely out of touch, I have no idea who t-pain is

He’s an artist popular in 2005. Hrs most famous for being arguably the first big artist to use that super autotuney voice

The first artist to use Auto Tune for a distinct effect (rather than just pitch correction) was Cher in her 1998 single Believe. Only a year after Auto Tune was released.

T-Pain absolutely was the one who popularized it through. To the point that among the general public "Auto Tune" is associated more with "electronic voice effects" than it is with "pitch correction."

Or just young - T-Pain was most relevant around 15 years ago.

He popularized using Auto Tune for electronic voice effects.

Play to what was popular in the youth of your key client personas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Pain

R&B Artist. Recently had an album of covers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4nMjyT4epA

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