Thanks for your awesome work. Aside from upgrading from the free version, is there any other way to show support?
Does the free version come with no data sync at all or just not end to end encrypted?
I use it for security testing our website, making sure form data is properly handled, etc. It's also good for reverse engineering apis and can replace files with your own too.
I'm looking to switch, but the ties to Kong make me nervous investing in the platform. Presumably because they might eventually make it always for-pay and/or focus on more enterprise-y features that I'm not interested in.
I would love to hear what others think.
If you're curious, you can read more about the acquisition from my perspective on my blog: https://schier.co/blog/indie-to-acquisition
Insomnia didn't need any configuration at all, and the UI is so much less bloated and confusing
Thanks to gschier and the Insomnia team for simplifying my team's life.
It doesn't seem to do all the things I am using Postman for.
https://github.com/frigus02/RESTer is a Firefox (or Chrome) extension that does most of the same stuff that PostMan does without requiring a standalone client install.
But, I think there's a massive amount of opacity and sneakiness in SaaS pricing. If you read Postman's announcement post yesterday, you easily could've walked away expecting just a 50% price increase when in reality you may have been getting bumped from $8/user/mo. to $24/user/mo. because of the new rate limits.
Companies should charge more, but they should defend the merits of those decisions, not try to slip them under the rug.
Edit: also, I'm not sure your claim that software is getting less expensive holds up. I can say for sure that business software has significantly outpaced inflation in its price increases, but our research on this didn't cover consumer: https://capiche.com/e/software-inflation-rate
For the past decade a number products rode the free software love boat, the gambit was to get organic community love and free marketing and hope that it somehow translates into VC endorsed financial rewards. This does not seem to be working out as expected.
People should use Postman if the premium price is worth it to them over Insomnia, Postwoman, etc, not out of some sense of obligation. A business full of expensive developers is not a charity.
Why? Shouldn't the price of software be determined by the equilibrium of supply and demand? Or are you suggesting there's far more demand than supply?
You always think of yourself as the exception, until it comes for you.
At the same time, investors are demanding that their portfolio companies begin to take profits after years of blasting away money in favor of growth-at-all-costs.
In my SaaS company, we have also increased prices and changed product packaging to generate greater profits in the past year. Customers hate it, but if they could see inside the company, they would see as I do that the changes are necessary to remain in business.
Hard disagree with absolutely all of this.
All people need unions, literally every human on earth deserves a union. If you work for anyone, anywhere, doing anything, you deserve a union. Any employee without a union is in an inherently unfair position, and is being taken advantage of.
Software should be cheap. Software should be as low cost as possible, without committing some sort of evil (sacrificing quality or working conditions or polluting, etc).
And a major goal of all humanity should be to drive the cost of all things as close to $0 as possible, without hurting anyone or doing anything unethical. We should be intentionally aiming for zero scarcity in all things, that's what progress is.
Making software some sort of expensive luxury that only certain people can afford is terrible, and that logic being applied to everything (from housing, to education, to healthcare and more) is the biggest problem in society today.
Would that mean that nobody can have individual salary negotiations? Your colleagues can vote that you have to strike? Are VPs and Directors in the same union with line level employees, or what are the "sides"?
I've never worked in a union environment, so this might be an unintentional caricature.
People do have non-financial motivations for developing software (accessibility improvements, creating community value, solving their own personal challenges or problems).
If you think this trend is going to change, I'd suspect (but can't guarantee of course) that you might be mistaken. Costs are going to continue to reduce, and software is going to continue to be easier to build, distribute and replicate; meanwhile new generations of developers will continue to expand the pool of participants in our software communities.
There are huge parts of the world now coming online which will simply not want (or be able) to pay the kind of salaries or fees that enterprises and software developers have been accustomed to receiving for their services.
Is it unreasonable to expect good software for low cost (or even free) if we have ample people, motivation, and ability to produce it, and if we enjoy a worldwide net benefit from it as a result?
The way I'd rephrase the situation is: how are investors and enterprise incumbents going to adjust if this trend continues, and what's a good way to ensure that as an individual you can participate and thrive in a world if this continues to happen.
A hint/suggestion from my biased opinion is that social safety nets are important, and nations that provide those for their communities will free up developers and resources to build the software and services that everyone really needs, rather than having developers spend their time on (yes high-paid, yes comfortable -- but broadly beneficial towards executives-and-investor class rather than community or nation) work.
In the pre-app store days it was incredibly difficult to make a business selling software if you weren't one of the very large players.
Having said that, to address-
"Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages"
-this would be fair retort if it was a new service charging {X}. If it isn't, the counter-argument is that they were undercharging to prevent competitors from making money / paying good wages.
I'm neither here nor there on this, but it certainly isn't a moral thing that you're holding it as. People are annoyed that they're going to have to pay more for less. Eh.
Companies have obligations to build real businesses & products that are based on realistic & solid plans from day 1. And they need to adjust those plans when things change, but by building a real company from day 1, those changes should be realistic and measured.
Also for automated testing in APIs https://dredd.org/en/latest/
Both open-sourced. I will say one of the best things about Postman was the Proxy support, but either way doesn't works with the iPhone and other stuff.
Whether or not you think this is a good idea is another matter, but it works.
I don't know anything about Postman, but this is an interesting case study on price increases. No one likes price increases, but they happen. So long as you have a strong ROI use case, you can navigate those discussions with your customers. E.g., "You were getting a 50x return, but listen, we're running a business over here, and a 45x return is still pretty darn good."
The challenge in Postman's case appears to be that they ALSO reduced the bundle components. So you compound the perception from "paying more" to "paying more but getting less". That's worse optics.
What I'd offer you think about is this may be a perfectly rational and even optimal customer solution. It's unifying two different pricing actions: price increase and product bundling. The logic being that many customers weren't using all the users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and integrations that were previously included in, say, the Pro bundle.
So as opposed to increasing price by—I'm making up numbers here—12% and leaving bundle elements the same, they increased price by 10% and cut features by 2%. The end result is exactly the same, but is actually better for most customers because they will get the same level of features they needed and not have to pay that additional 2% for features they weren't using anyway.
Albeit, this means that you now don't have pretty bundles, and are selling features à la carte, which can be hard to manage. OR you make all those customers upgrade to Enterprise, which they'll be pissed about, but still falls into the logical "paying more for more" optics.
https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/
You get a mock server OOTB.
So if I understand that right, there will be no free plan from 1st of Feb going forward. Or do others read that differently?
I should probably start looking for alternatives and saving my API documentations from Postman somewhat better.
Surely you could probably setup a ton of ec2 or gcp instances and try that out, but at least for me, Postman easily allowed me to do that (and might still stick with them even with the price hike).
If anyone does have any suggestions, that'd be great as well.
In all seriousness - Regardless of the solution Postman/Postwomen/Insomnia/Paw/etc - People use these tools so they can easily manipulate any part of their query, without needing to lookup curl flags and nuances.
Serious question: How do you construct complex curl requests? Do you do it all on the command line? Or you do it in a text editor? If you want to change the field of a form for your post request, how quickly can you change it? Curl is a great tool, but for sandbox-like usage it's just too clunky of a UX IMO.
The primary value add is the ability to organize groups of related requests and then run them as part of a test suite and assert against the outcomes. It's essentially a test tool for REST APIs that's accessible to a less technical audience.
https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/
Mock server OOTB and a bunch of other goodies.
Syncing collections is a solved problem that postman resolved so they could charge for it.
(1): https://paw.cloud/
I don't see why I should be billed annually for using a managed HTTP client. Given that, Paw sounds better equipped for my personal API development needs all for a one time payment.
I’d really like to see something similar in Windows.
