Postman silently auto-installs AI plugins and attempts to share all API data

It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.

I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore

Who still uses Postman? In my experience it became insanely slow and bloated. Switched to Bruno. IMO, Postman is like uTorrent, everybody heard about it and many install because of inertia.

We went to bruno years ago and has been good. Nice to be able to store the request definitions in git. But to be honest, don't really need any of these tools anymore.

Working in healthcare, and Postman got decertified by our Cyber team for this. We all switched to Bruno overnight. Their sales team is pinging us like gangbusters though.

Postman went from a great lightweight tool to a bloated up-selling mess.

I have been building Kreya [1] for over 6 years now as a Postman alternative. It's offline-first and privacy focused with a storage format made for git.

In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...

[1] https://kreya.app

If anyone is interested in a Postman alternative but likes TUIs and leans more toward using .http files, check out resterm[0].

btw - I'm the author.

[0]https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm

I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today. The best version of it was just a logger and a formatter on top of an http client. The proto import was nice for gRPC. Who thought that relatively simple tool needed accounts and MCPs and whatever else they've thrown into it?

Why do all these tools require a paid account? Bruno specifically says it’s platform-free and stores everything in git.

We are in the new era of provider malware. GREEEAAAAT! Thanks AI!

I replaced that garbage with Insomnia years back. I’m just waiting until I hear that Insomnia is also a problem and where to go next.

We left Postman long time ago and only use Bruno.

Wow, the timing is perfect, I was going to post about this. I also found out last night that they actually proxy your requests without your permission. I have setup an exclusion within my firewall for certain request parameters, but it kept getting blocked despite all my settings a though it was going through their server. That really pissed me off since these requests actually contain sensitive data they did not have permission to intercept.

Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).

Lots of discussion about less terrible alternatives to postman. For those already using a Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well. I haven't used it for anything too complicated, but for routine stuff where you need to hit an endpoint and fiddle with the payload and headers it's great.

If there's ever been a perfect app to vibecode your own replacement, it's postman. Claude can knock out a completely usable competitor in under an hour, I'm sure of it. A day of tweaking and you'll have everything you need.

Would you be willing to pay for a local only postman alternative if it was built by hand and native (no electron)?

I really don't see the point of Postman. It used to be light and efficient, now it's bloated and inefficient

Postman was amazing 6-8 years ago. What a downfall it’s been.

Curl Web Interface shouldn't require any payment at all

This is their very bad attempt to survive , who need this in the age of agents ?

I haven’t used postman for years and I don’t know why anyone would. Are people really paying for it?

Use impostman.el/verb.el/restclient.el in Emacs.

If even half of that is true then they’re cooked

Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.

If there ever was a tool that could be vibe coded, a postman-like is the one.

Never liked Postman since they started forcing everyone to signup. Sometimes I hate VCs who unnecessarily funds and ruins a perfectly fine product (of course founders are equally guilty).

Postman went from a nice tool to an almost virus in just a few years. It's crazy that anyone still uses it.

I'm currently using Bruno (https://www.usebruno.com/)

Part of Postman's ongoing enshittification...

Thanks, I still use Postman out of muscle memory. Will use Bruno or Insomnia (as recommended here)

Thank god we moved to Bruno and sometimes just http files in vs code or jetbrains

Enshittification wins again. :(

Thank you for the reminder, I had not deleted Postman yet. Done :D

Unsurprising. I loved the tool but it was obviously time to drop it when they began pushing for logins.

I've always kind of thought that Postman was an enshittification story waiting to happen. I've always felt like they prey on people who just aren't comfortable with the command line, and so there isn't much more stooping lower for them than something like this.

Does everything have to go to shit when money is involved?

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who the hell needs that. skills are just md files