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

[stavros]

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.

[bananapub]

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

[Ekaros]

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...

[Veuxdo]

It's the circle of life.

[tutfbhuf]

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.

[taftster]

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.

[jugg1es]

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

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

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

[Nihilartikel]

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

[polotics]

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.

[ado__dev]

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

[TheFragenTaken]

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

[binary132]

yet

what’s wrong with curl again?

[darkhorse13]

At this point, this is worse than parody.

[gardenhedge]

Straight out of (HBO) Silicon Valley

[rsync]

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 ...

[pavlov]

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...

[bananapub]

> Enterprise sales gonna enterprise sell?

mate it's a tool to make http requests

[johnny99k]

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.

[b99andla]

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!

[nojvek]

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

Never got the postman hype.

[neglesaks]

I'm in HTTPain

[bananapub]

> 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.

[Voultapher]

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

[Ekaros]

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...

[NovemberWhiskey]

You’ll never go poor overestimating developer laziness.

[mgkimsal]

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?

[therealdrag0]

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

[iobert]

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.

[Invictus0]

What does postman even do?

[rpigab]

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.

[bundie]

Wrap curl around a GUI

[bananapub]

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.

[dgellow]

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

[darkhorse13]

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

[fatnoah]

This is the first thing that came to mind:

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