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> for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees

You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.

That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc

We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.

AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.

We'll see how it goes.

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

B2B maybe? Usually these businesses thrive solely on flirting with the CTO and getting them to sign a lucrative contract and then mandate internal usage. I'm speaking from experience.

I cannot imagine 1500+ employees "working" on this. Wtf, it's a single person project.

I logged in to postman today after 3 years to use some public API, and god, it was so damn unusable. It took me navigating through "workspace", "environments", etc etc before I could hit the simplest of http endpoints.

Someone should vibe-code a VC death clock for developer tools. Enter a company, and it will deduce from its last funding round and headcount the moment it all goes to shit.

In an utlimate twist of irony such a tool could itself pivot to investors because the moment it gets really bad is also the moment to invest in the competition.

I'm not saying that's my strategy with Bugsink, but I'm not saying it isn't either.

> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+

Because, current valuations are completely detached from any operational or market realities that affect a company. The metric has become the goal, and the metric is controlled by nontechnical people that have no intuitive understanding of how technical products are used. Even worse, they’ve all gone though a vibe coding tutorial and now either believe they have real technical depth, or believe that it doesn’t matter.

> Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.

All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.

I used to use Postman daily almost ten years ago. Then as my last hurrah before retirement, I took an embedded job that didn't involve me beating on a web API, so I didn't use Postman anymore.

So imagine that I hear about this "Postman" product that involves subscriptions, and AI, and "valued at $X billion" and all this crap, and you can see how I seriously thought that there was another product called "Postman" that wasn't the product I used to use. Turns out...

You don’t know any developer yes.

I do know business analysts, testers, non-technical people asking me for postman collections.

Postman became de-facto standard for businesses. Even though devs have ditched it.

I haven’t met anyone using MongoDB in what feels like 12 years, but it’s a $26B company.

There’s apparently a surprisingly profitable enterprise afterlife to developer tools that manage to become popular in the right moment, even if the moment is fairly short.

I’ve never understood the allure of postman. Curl has been my thing for a while. I don’t see that changing.

wrote about this phenomenon: https://nonograph.com/write-some-software-give-it-away-for-f...

Yeah, they managed to land on the IT blacklist for several of our customers.

Nowadays Portman is forbidden for project delivery, unless the customer development team also uses it.

> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+

Like statistics, 90% of valuations are totally made-up.

A surprising number of developers I work with don't actually know how to use curl. Postman is ubiquitous among that crowd.

Yeah, Insomnia replaced Postman everywhere I've been.

> Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees

Wtf!! how

>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.

The good thing is that now takes about 2 days to replicate with an agent the parts that matter from their whole offering and tell them to go f themselves.

For some reason, it is very popular in my country (Costa Rica). Every freelancer I’ve worked with only knows about postman It’s like it was very popular back in the day and people never got the memo there’s better options out there

We're using Postman at work (I think we have a subscription for 10 or 20 users), mostly when doing REST development and to share the API calls between people. Though I rarely have to use it so each time I'm so confused of between the collections, environment, vaults, variables...

Also if you have an alternative that's easier to use, I'm interested

> I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore

I have no need for it, but there's one company I work with and all of their developers still use it. What do you do/recommend instead?

They chased B2B revenue too hard, my work built internal alt in a few days that fits more appropriately with our orgs usecases earlier this year, Sad lol

They were valued at $5.6bn in 2021, in the ZIRP boom, and havent raised since. Unlikely they can raise at anything like that now.

I always felt like Postman was just a waste of time next to simple bash helper scripts wrapping curl commands.

> I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore

Its endemic in enterprise engineering/QA, for all the reasons we mourn its loss its big, and big is trusted in these circles

Doesn't help that the core product is one of the easiest vibe-code prompts ever.

It seems like cursed(blessed) niche? In search of alternatives couple of years ago, I'm stumbled upon Mockoon which looked really like a single person project. Now, judging by their webpage, I see they are going the same way

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

Just out of curiosity, what are developers using these days?

Postman valued at 5 billon? WTF? I mean the IT industry lives in a fart cloud honestly. I really really think everything is just a little bit overvalued, isn't it?

People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.

You're stating this on your combinator forums of all places. Do you know who owns and runs that company and their economic principles?

Sales called me a couple weeks ago. I told them Postman had a bad reputation among developers and I wouldn’t be using it. The salesperson was just absolutely incredulous that anyone could feel this way. It was pretty funny. Maybe they’re drinking their own Kool Aid.

1500+ ppl? :-O

I feel the same way about docker. This things just running containers and yet its a billion dollar company.

When was the last time you heard about a VC-backed company going out of business? They either go unicorn or they get frozen until another VC-funded company is large enough to absorb them and quietly absorb their lack of value. Postman is a big morsel but I guarantee some company is being lined up just perfectly to consume them.

Yeah. Curl the little side project:

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Yes a prime example of enshittification. You attract attention making something humble in scope but good.. but then it is compelled to become something much more. Same story with Coursera imo

Everything will be enshittified, it’s not a question of if but when. The incentives are simple, the stock ticker must go up.

> a tiny OSS/passion project like curl

Um.

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

I think most people here on HN is within or close by the "Innovators" part of the "Technology adoption life cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle). When Postman hit mainstream, it was already bloated and ruined, and "Innovators" had already moved on to something else, but for Postman that's just the beginning, as they're in the "Early Majority" part, and still have a tail to ride, so investors and everyone else can extract all the value from the remaining s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ users.

This is why the right to fork exists in open source licenses. It’s easier than ever now, too, thanks to LLMs. You might even be able to oneshot forking and removing the malware and rebranding and rebuilding f/oss crapware these days.

I’ve been considering setting up a nonprofit solely to do this and to republish things like Mattermost, Stats, Bitwarden, etc with the corporate antifeatures ripped out.

> Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees

... what the fuck. Certainly explains things

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

Yep, one of them. I loved Postman but gone back to plain cURL and the dogshit that is IntelliJ's built-in HTTP request tool.

As for the question... easy. Markets can stay irrational for a very long time...

EDIT: sorry, I was cranky. I just really don't like Postman/its UI/BS. To each his/her own.

I am still dumbfounded what value Postman can make in capturing all the publics usage. Sure they could mine the data, but they cant exactly use it in any legal way so why bother ?

That sounds all sorts of illegal, and all sorts of immoral.

Did you flag it / create an issue?

github.com/alainnothere/mailBoy

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50359814

Mostly enterprise teams and intermediate devs from my experience. I lead the API platform for a popular e-signature company, and a postman collection is the first thing devs ask for. Even when we point them to our docs, they'd rather just import a collection and start hitting endpoints immediately.

Haven't heard of Bruno until now. Looks like a solid offline-first tool. I don't see a public collection or web runner, and it looks like it supports GitHub-based sharing. Postman on the other hand, their public API network (or whatever they call it) along with the web runner reduce a lot of friction for API vendors like us and for dev teams who just want to quickly play with the API in the browser, especially during their evaluation stage.

Switched from Bruno to Voiden, it's more of a postman + notebook. Bruno started adding premium and stuff and I didn't want to wait to migrate again...

It was really good until... idk 3 or so years back? Whenever they started forcing you to login to use it.

bruno is really great used it for a while but the 5 API syncs a month on the free tier is a pain, had to switch to Apidog never been so happy with unlimited syncs

Bruno is no better in the way that matters - curl/requests/httpclient etc. are now easier to write and understand than any external templating tool.

Use to work at one org in a bloated financial company that was paying Postman nearly $40,000 a month for a license provided to every person in the org. Regardless if they were a dev or not. I suspect the sales pitch pushes for unnecessary licenses because out of around 500 employees in the org, only 80 were developers and out of those 80 only one single team used postman. So this one org was overpaying by nearly >95%, doubt this org is truly unique regarding this.

I suspect that nearly every single public corporation are likely overpaying for software products, it's a waste of capital and extremely inefficient. All it shows is that corporations are too loose with their money and can probably deserve to get their tax obligations increased by a good 20-40% if they're this okay with wasting it.

I use hopscotch and highly recommend it. Very similar UI to postman and it just works.

I'm not really a vibe-coder but it seems like the easiest possible tool to vibe-code

Or just give your agent JSON and tell it to use curl

It's one of those things that have become "enterprise." There's always been better competitors out there, but it was so big, it's the easy choice for companies that are too lazy to do proper/fast vetting.

A lot of GxP environments had already ditched Postman because it auto-syncs your API schemas to their cloud, as well as values and secrets.

Bruno is fantastic. Switched a while ago and haven't even thought about going back

+1 for Bruno, it's simple and great.

They offer a paid version though, so I'm always afraid it's going to enshittify in the future, just like Postman and then Insomnia did.

Mad respect. Kreya is my go-to for playing GRPC endpoints. Basically every other tool has some whacky behaviour, got rapidly abandoned, or had janky ux.

As do all great things once VC sinks its teeth in.

I remember it being annoying to use even in 2019.

One nice thing about it is only the builds are licensed. If you build from source it is MIT.

+1 for Yaak, I've used it for over a year for work and personal projects. It is stable and fast (also the dev behind it has the first name as me, so I'm a bit biased towards other Gregs!).

> I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today.

You can’t have a unicorn valuation built on a simple offline client.

This is basically standard SV play book - first step is „fix“ it to have a cloud component/account. Then store some of the data in cloud only - say for example for team sharing or a „workspace“. Then make some features paid only. Then ramp up the enshitification till metrics show it’s saturated and users will bear no more

> [for every] Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well

There's also one available as a major mode for Emacs: https://melpa.org/#/restclient

If the command line is acceptable but you want more of a focus on usability than curl has, there's httpie (https://httpie.io/) and its clone xh (https://github.com/ducaale/xh).

The JetBrains IDE, Visual Studio, and VS Code all support http files as well, which can be checked into an application.

Bruno has some premium features: https://www.usebruno.com/pricing

Insomnia 8.0 and above requires an account on their servers to use. The stated reason was that this makes it easier to advertise to you. No thanks.

Older versions are fine, though.

https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/discussions/6590

Insomnia _has_ a problem, since it forces you to create a cloud account with them.

Bruno [1] is the current better alternative to Insomnia.

[1] https://www.usebruno.com/

I've been using Insomnia whenever I can since before Covid. Its been nice, but ever since they started pushing accounts so aggressively, I've switched to Yaak to get back to that feel of a simple API client that prompted me to switch to Insomia in the first place. 100% recommend. https://yaak.app/

Why not do your own (yes) diligence instead of relying on hearsay? It doesn't take a lot of digging to see it in this case.

Just installed it, it's funny their landing page is littered with every AI buzzword too. But I am going to give Insomnia a try, I've heard people talk about it and a few others on HN over the years. I just need a glorified cURL GUI at the end of the day.

Already built. Check out Sannr. I'm a former Postmanaut and built it as an open source solution.

Sannr is an API platform built for coding agents that builds API context over time.

Free name idea: GETBoy

Been some years since I had to use it (and I think my company jettisoned it shortly thereafter), but at its peak, I remember it doing some things really well that were a PITA to setup locally in a terminal with cURL.

The biggest "Oh my god, this is so much easier" moment was just setting up a tiny JS script onto the login API to stash the bearer token from the return response into a variable, and then propagate it into the header of all subsequent calls. Trying to script THAT in Bash (parsing the bearer token from the return response) was also a headache and never worked 100% for me.

Although that was me trying to do it manually. I'm sure a vibe-coded solution would probably work well enough these days.

I was on a team where work was often presented and demo'd to semi technical managers and stakeholders. For the backend guys, this was the best we had.

Nice to see the leaner alternatives people are suggesting here.

I think because editing in terminals text was not a good development experience, navigating the curdor, and pressing Enter would issue the command.

Personally I use a wrapper cli I built myself over curl which automatically gets api docs of my product and easily get the token so its great for agents

nah, a python script that wraps what needs wrapping has been my go-to since that day Postman said I had to log in

People are paying for Bruno, and probably wishing it would load near instantly (no electron), so there's like a market.

Golf playing bill paying ceos and ctos

Why miss? It still exists, just renamed as RapidAPI → https://paw.cloud

It is still fully native (real native, not fake web-driver native).

They have an open format for API collections: https://www.opencollection.com/

I made the switch to Bruno years ago after getting hounded by Postman’s sales team and Insomnia started requiring an account.

Works well enough without getting in my way.

Does anyone know if Bruno is not on the same path as Postman?

Switched to Bruno myself, and moved my team to it last year as well. Vast improvement over late stage Postman.

I built an open source alternative called Sannr. It's an API platform built for coding agents.

As I've mentioned in other posts, I'm a former Postmanaut who built it as a response to the lack of options for agents on the market.

No. Postman sells nothing of value.

At this point I do not see why the entirety of their software could not be a one shot prompt for the price of deer nuts.

Depends. Is it an investment grant or loan? The former is money to grow with no expectations on growth. The latter has an investor giving money in expectation of a return.

Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.

Pretty much. It's just a question of how fast it happens. The more capable something is of making money without compromising the product or exploiting users the longer it will take, but once people who are sick with pathological greed get involved they'll eventually start to demand enshittifying the product and selling out the userbase to squeeze more and more money into their pockets.

Until we stop relying on SV as the standard-bearer for tech culture? Absolutely.

Yep, you can create a pretty HTML harness even for your APIs.

Or pre-AI it was a python script inside a notebook.