We moved from postman to insomnia a year ago and have loved it due to its simplicity and ease of use. The ability to use the "environment" variables is amazingly flexible since you can use them in almost every text field.
I have to agree, I've been enjoying insomnia more, especially with the dark theme. I'm also glad the developer makes enough income on it. I also enjoy using Mockoon since it keeps a history of requests I make when I proxy it, very useful. I wish I knew a good proxying API tool that was a little more autonomous and feature full.
Does the recent Kong acquisition not concern you at all?
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 switched to Insomnia because I was having a miserable time with Postman being able to resolve hostnames created as part of a Docker network on my local machine. There were a bunch of stack overflow and similar posts about how to configure it properly and nothing worked.
Insomnia didn't need any configuration at all, and the UI is so much less bloated and confusing
I use Insomnia too but wished it saved a history of my past requests. Other than that, it's actually much much faster than PostMan. I wonder if it's because it doesn't save my request history...
My team and I switched about a year ago now, haven't looked back. Postman was getting too bloated with features that tended towards a QA, or possibly even non-technical audience.
Thanks to gschier and the Insomnia team for simplifying my team's life.
Does insomnia allow you to set the mime types for each part of a multi-part request? That's one feature that Postman doesn't have that has irked me a bit.
Worth pointing out that postwoman is free and opensource. It is not quite as full-featured as postman, but for quick mocking without requiring registration, it is a great option.
https://postwoman.io/
https://insomnia.rest/ is a pretty great alternative. The only thing you don't get for free is data syncing.
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.
Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages. I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. Most people expect things for free or very cheap and I blame the Apple App Store for that. Everyone expects their software to be free or $0.99 nowadays. Even $3.99 is considered too expensive. All this is doing is creating deflation in our industry. Software should be expensive. We don’t need unions, we need to change people’s expectations on how much software costs and not drive down prices to $0.
I agree with you. I subscribe to @Patio11's philosophy of "charge more".
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
The problem products like Postman and others (Elastic et al) are having is one of "have your cake and eat it too".
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.
Of course we should drive down prices to $0, that's practically the definition of progress. Our whole value proposition is the ability to offer more for less.
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.
Software developers should realize that as their salaries increase (and I'm not even talking about FAANG), companies that are selling SaaS and software solutions have to charge more in order to continue doing the fine work of developing stuff.
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.
No one is complaining that Postman isn't free for business. Take another look at the article. In summation: "So, for more money, you get fewer users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and integrations."
> I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. . Software should be expensive. We don’t need unions, we need to change people’s expectations on how much software costs and not drive down prices to $0.
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.
Software doesn't have to be written by companies - see: GNU/Linux, vim, Python, VLC, Jitsi... and the list could continue for a long time.
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.
The belief that software should be free long precedes any app stores ("I paid $N for the computer, why should I have to pay for the software‽‽‽"). It's especially weird to peg the blame on the Apple App Store given that it has managed to get people to spend billions on flippant stuff they would never have paid a penny for.
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.
I mean you’re right, companies need to make money, but it’s not the users fault. The play postman made (and a lot of other companies) was that they could make up for low profit margins with high/increasing user growth indefinitely. That’s how you get high valuations with low current profit. When companies have to quickly & drastically make large pricing changes, they’re implicitly telling you that the state of affairs at that company is that they need to make money now on current users.
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.
Postman is a good tool that I've used for many years. It's currently open on my desktop. However I would never pay for their team collaboration features and I doubt I would pay much for the desktop client if they started charging for it.
There are too many bizarre UI choices, too many missing features, and it's much too difficult to maintain scripted tests in their awful JSON based "collection" format.
The good news is that they have lots of room for improvement and it's quite a bit better than some of the older alternatives like the absurdly awful SoapUI / ReadyAPI line of products.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned https://paw.cloud. It's a Postman alternative that's native (no Electron/Javascript garbage) with a simple one-time-purchase pricing model.
The submitted title was "Postman announces 50% price hike starting Feb 2020". That information isn't in the article, so it would be better to post it as a comment in the thread, rather than putting it in the title. That would also allow for supplying more context, such as what the price was before.
I started using Insomnia a few months ago and it's been such a pleasure to use. I find it more user friendly and less "in your face" than Postman. Everything just seemed to work the as expected.
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.
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.
I work with lot of APIS (our team owns atleast 30 of them) switching between different environments and have found Paw (https://paw.cloud/) more productive than postman.
It puts me off that its $6 more a month than Github team, and I felt it was steep before. We are heavy postman users, and have been from the start. We will consider different options now.
> Existing customers using the free version of Postman can lock in 2019 rates by upgrading to the existing Postman Pro annual plan or Postman Enterprise before February 1, 2020.
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.
One reason I use Postman is to check latency from all around the world.
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.
Shout out to postwoman, https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman which is a FOSS clone. No sync-ing yet but it's on my to do to add in basic collection sync support.
I mean, those prices are still not massive if your team is using Postman a lot. I don't think they won't lose much business over this move and overall it's understandable when you look at the expansion of the software and the probably much bigger team behind it.
[+] [-] __erik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gschier|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dashwav|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocmcd|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fjp|6 years ago|reply
Insomnia didn't need any configuration at all, and the UI is so much less bloated and confusing
[+] [-] AznHisoka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metanoia|6 years ago|reply
Thanks to gschier and the Insomnia team for simplifying my team's life.
[+] [-] lliamander|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thecolorblue|6 years ago|reply
It doesn't seem to do all the things I am using Postman for.
[+] [-] numbers|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scolson|6 years ago|reply
https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman
[+] [-] ossworkerrights|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] skrowl|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miket|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] remote_phone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awwstn|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Edmond|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] satyrnein|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xwowsersx|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ttul|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fxleach|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxsilver|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jka|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] endorphone|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] awinder|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chasingthewind|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickaljord|6 years ago|reply
https://postwoman.io/
https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman
[+] [-] reallydontask|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmaster1440|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksahin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] smokey_thompson|6 years ago|reply
https://insomnia.rest/
[+] [-] nwah1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fjcero|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] basseq|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Edmond|6 years ago|reply
https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/
You get a mock server OOTB.
[+] [-] mrnaught|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ardeay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sdoering|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sdan|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vorpalhex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akuji1993|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tus88|6 years ago|reply