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I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Paw is an advanced developer tool with serious functionality for testing APIs, and many of the most upvoted

I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Paw is an advanced developer tool with serious functionality for testing APIs, and many of the most upvoted comments are basically just posting links to similar tools, with substantially less functionality, that are free. How many of these commenters make thousands of dollars every month as professional software engineers? How many make thousands each week? Paw is an extremely high quality, native Mac app, made by a small team trying to provide for their families by building software for other software engineers like all of us. It's a paid tool but it's probably the most sophisticated API testing tool that exists. I've been a completely satisfied Paw user for over a year. It's been invaluable to me and I use it constantly. It is worth the money. It is more sophisticated with a far better user interface than anything else out there. Use the trial, buy it if you like it, but this pattern of comments saying Check Out Product Z, It's Like Product Y But Free (And Less Good) makes me hate coming to HN.

wmccullough 10y ago
I've observed a very similar thing for awhile now. I'm to the point where I rarely delve into the comments anymore. I've noticed what you've seen about product announcements, or people just generally being contrarian for no reason that adds value to a discussion. I'm eagerly waiting for the day that I see this happen, and I mean literally: "Scientists find a new reason to explain why the sky appears blue." HN: I know nothing about science but the sky is definitely azure, not blue.
elmigranto 10y ago
I don't really see how any of the facts you mention makes linking similar tools here a bad thing? Unless someone's bashing on Paw for being a paid software in a disrespectful manner, I think it is fine to link to others, why not?
cwp 10y ago
Yeah. I bought Paw and love it. It's easily paid for its self in time saved.
swilliams 10y ago
I was a happy Postman user for a long time. I tried Paw on a lark (the importance of free trials) and loved it. Totally worth the money to me, and I've only scratched the surface with it. I especially like the plugins ecosystem.
tooFastFuckYou 10y ago
I don't buy a lot of software, but when I do buy it from a small-time developer, I'm pretty psyched to support their efforts. Application development, especially by good designers, seems to be dying. We need to reward good design. So I wish the Paw guys well and have already downloaded the trial. Unless it sucks, I'll buy it. And people: Do NOT buy music-centric phones with no headphone jack.
pikzen 10y ago
>Paw is an extremely high quality, native Mac app, made by a small team trying to provide for their families by building software for other software engineers like all of us. It's a paid tool but it's probably the most sophisticated API testing tool that exists. Thing is, most of us don't care. I don't care if Paw engineers aren't selling their software. Just like they shouldn't care if I'm not selling mine. People are not going to stop using software that does 80% of what Paw does (but probably 100% of their needs) because it hurts their feelings. If Product Z is less good than Paw but still fills my needs and is free, Product Z is going to be my choice. Bonus points if it's FOSS. There's also the fact that not all of us work on Mac. I'd love to try out Paw, but unless I see a .deb somewhere, I'm out of luck. So my solution is to grab alternatives. >Check Out Product Z, It's Like Product Y But Free (And Less Good) makes me hate coming to HN. At the other extreme, we have software monoculture. Variety of software is good. Making FOSS software known is good. I'm actually going to go a step further and say that if FOSS software copies pixel for pixel Paw's UI and UX, that is a good thing.
- tigershark 10y ago
  How copying completely (stealing) the fruit of someone else hard work can ever be a good thing?
  - pikzen 10y ago
    Because, in the case of FOSS, that is making good software available to all of humanity. From the $200k SF developer who can afford Paw easily, to the lowly paid eastern European developer, to the broke student. That is of course assuming that the copy is done to have feature parity with the original. Copying solely to surf on the popularity of software while at the same time making it awful is a problem. Also, if you don't want your work copied, don't put it out.
    - tigershark 10y ago
      When someone decides to write some very useful software to sell it and someone else "copies pixel per pixel" the software is simply stealing the original author work. If you want to write your software and release it with an open source license you are perfectly able to do it. If you are simply doing an exact copy "pixel per pixel" of someone else work and releasing it as an open source you are stealing his intellectual property given that the original license is NOT open source. I really love open source, but people that think in this way seriously risk to undermine my trust on the whole OSS model.
pbreit 10y ago
If there's a free option that's pretty good (Postman) I think it's reasonable to include that in the discussion. I would especially like to understand how the 2 compare. For me, the free aspect is important beyond just my paying for it: I create collections and I want them to be as accessible as possible.
- WayneBro 10y ago
  Especially when the free competitor works cross platform and doesn't lock you into Apple's craptastic desktop OS.
cyberferret 10y ago
Fair point, but I also think that a fair number of HN readers who are the target audience for Paw are not necessarily high paid engineers and are likely home hobbyists or students etc. who are building stuff on the side on a ramen budget. As someone who is trying to bootstrap a SaaS app myself that is currently costing me a around $1000/mth, spending yet another $60 (converted to AU$) is something to think long and hard about, especially seeing as I have been using Postman for several versions with good results. If someone can point out a compelling reason that Paw > Postman v2 because of x,y and z then I am happy to consider that and perhaps splurge for a licence. I don't think $70 is expensive for good software BTW, but I just haven't been sold on the value of it so far.
- dvcrn 10y ago
  I agree with this. I tried paw with the hope to replace postman (because of chromium / electron) but just couldn't convince myself to jump ship. Paw users, what are things that Paw can do (better) than Postman?
  - mittsh 10y ago
    As the founder of Paw, I'm certainly biased, so I'll stick to the facts. Paw has "dynamic values" which lets you inline computed components in any field of your request: useful for pointing to values from other requests, previous responses (parsing is done on the fly, no need to refresh), which is useful if you want to send back an auth token returned by a previous request. Dynamic values can do also stuff like MD5/SHA hashes, HMAC, URL/hex/base64 encode, timestamps, randomizers (Chance.js, JSON schema faker) with no code required (you can write custom JS snippets too if ever needed). For example, we once demo'ed the Algolia guys that their custom HMAC-based signature for client-side search was doable with no code. So, if you have the need, you can do custom stuff easily. Also, extensions (many are built by users) are bringing lots of extra features we would have not thought about ourselves: https://paw.cloud/extensions/ https://paw.cloud/extensions/ Environment variables in Paw can be nested or computed (with "dynamic values" described above). It can be useful, for example, to have an "Auth" variable that contains a pointer that accesses the "user.access_token" JSON path from inside the latest Login request, so you can later simply point to the "Auth" variable everywhere else. One other thing about envs, is that you can have independent groups of environments: a typical example is you have a "Server" group with envs called "Prod", "Staging", "Local" and independently a setup with user credentials or variables that are more like static globals (AWS Keys, etc.)… Now regarding to the team syncing service, "Paw for Teams". It has branches, snapshots and full history. In a dev team, it means one dev can experiment stuff on the schema for API v2 while others are fixing bugs on API v1, and when API v2 is ready they can seamlessly merge the new updates back to the v1 branch. Also, we've made the choice not to be real-time synced, because it doesn't fit well to software development: when I'm experimenting stuff with an API I don't want others to be polluted by my temporary garbage. So instead you "commit" changes only when ready. More about Teams here: https://paw.cloud/teams https://paw.cloud/teams Last but not least, Paw locally encrypts with a randomly generated symmetric passphrase all credentials you enter in your projects, that means your server keys, access tokens, etc. are a lot safer. And now that you can (optionally) sync with Paw's backend, we certainly don't want to have your secrets in cleartext on our infra. As passphrases are never uploaded (obviously! but by default stored in OS X Keychain), it's the users responsibility to safeguard them and share them with their team (on 1Password or similar).
polytap 10y ago
I couldn't upvote this enough. The lack of objective comparison in comments is astounding, and it fits a pattern.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
I actually like this pattern. I mean, as a (not so highly paid) developer who also does a lot of personal/hobby programming, I'm evaluating and using a ton of tools every year. If I were to ignore the free alternatives, I would be utterly broke now. Sure, if something is a product I'll be using day-in, day-out for the foreseeable future, I'll happily shell out $quite-a-lot. But if I expect to use it for half a day every three months or so, I'll look for something free. Like, e.g. I do some amount of vector drawing for random reasons (designing t-shirts for myself, logos for my projects, user interfaces, whatever) - enough to figure out Inkscape, not enough to justify buying Illustrator.

wmccullough 10y ago

I've observed a very similar thing for awhile now. I'm to the point where I rarely delve into the comments anymore. I've noticed what you've seen about product announcements, or people just generally being contrarian for no reason that adds value to a discussion. I'm eagerly waiting for the day that I see this happen, and I mean literally: "Scientists find a new reason to explain why the sky appears blue." HN: I know nothing about science but the sky is definitely azure, not blue.

elmigranto 10y ago

I don't really see how any of the facts you mention makes linking similar tools here a bad thing? Unless someone's bashing on Paw for being a paid software in a disrespectful manner, I think it is fine to link to others, why not?

cwp 10y ago

Yeah. I bought Paw and love it. It's easily paid for its self in time saved.

swilliams 10y ago

I was a happy Postman user for a long time. I tried Paw on a lark (the importance of free trials) and loved it. Totally worth the money to me, and I've only scratched the surface with it. I especially like the plugins ecosystem.

tooFastFuckYou 10y ago

I don't buy a lot of software, but when I do buy it from a small-time developer, I'm pretty psyched to support their efforts. Application development, especially by good designers, seems to be dying. We need to reward good design. So I wish the Paw guys well and have already downloaded the trial. Unless it sucks, I'll buy it. And people: Do NOT buy music-centric phones with no headphone jack.

pikzen 10y ago

>Paw is an extremely high quality, native Mac app, made by a small team trying to provide for their families by building software for other software engineers like all of us. It's a paid tool but it's probably the most sophisticated API testing tool that exists. Thing is, most of us don't care. I don't care if Paw engineers aren't selling their software. Just like they shouldn't care if I'm not selling mine. People are not going to stop using software that does 80% of what Paw does (but probably 100% of their needs) because it hurts their feelings. If Product Z is less good than Paw but still fills my needs and is free, Product Z is going to be my choice. Bonus points if it's FOSS. There's also the fact that not all of us work on Mac. I'd love to try out Paw, but unless I see a .deb somewhere, I'm out of luck. So my solution is to grab alternatives. >Check Out Product Z, It's Like Product Y But Free (And Less Good) makes me hate coming to HN. At the other extreme, we have software monoculture. Variety of software is good. Making FOSS software known is good. I'm actually going to go a step further and say that if FOSS software copies pixel for pixel Paw's UI and UX, that is a good thing.

tigershark 10y ago
How copying completely (stealing) the fruit of someone else hard work can ever be a good thing?
- pikzen 10y ago
  Because, in the case of FOSS, that is making good software available to all of humanity. From the $200k SF developer who can afford Paw easily, to the lowly paid eastern European developer, to the broke student. That is of course assuming that the copy is done to have feature parity with the original. Copying solely to surf on the popularity of software while at the same time making it awful is a problem. Also, if you don't want your work copied, don't put it out.
  - tigershark 10y ago
    When someone decides to write some very useful software to sell it and someone else "copies pixel per pixel" the software is simply stealing the original author work. If you want to write your software and release it with an open source license you are perfectly able to do it. If you are simply doing an exact copy "pixel per pixel" of someone else work and releasing it as an open source you are stealing his intellectual property given that the original license is NOT open source. I really love open source, but people that think in this way seriously risk to undermine my trust on the whole OSS model.

pbreit 10y ago

If there's a free option that's pretty good (Postman) I think it's reasonable to include that in the discussion. I would especially like to understand how the 2 compare. For me, the free aspect is important beyond just my paying for it: I create collections and I want them to be as accessible as possible.

WayneBro 10y ago
Especially when the free competitor works cross platform and doesn't lock you into Apple's craptastic desktop OS.

cyberferret 10y ago

Fair point, but I also think that a fair number of HN readers who are the target audience for Paw are not necessarily high paid engineers and are likely home hobbyists or students etc. who are building stuff on the side on a ramen budget. As someone who is trying to bootstrap a SaaS app myself that is currently costing me a around $1000/mth, spending yet another $60 (converted to AU$) is something to think long and hard about, especially seeing as I have been using Postman for several versions with good results. If someone can point out a compelling reason that Paw > Postman v2 because of x,y and z then I am happy to consider that and perhaps splurge for a licence. I don't think $70 is expensive for good software BTW, but I just haven't been sold on the value of it so far.

dvcrn 10y ago
I agree with this. I tried paw with the hope to replace postman (because of chromium / electron) but just couldn't convince myself to jump ship. Paw users, what are things that Paw can do (better) than Postman?
- mittsh 10y ago
  As the founder of Paw, I'm certainly biased, so I'll stick to the facts. Paw has "dynamic values" which lets you inline computed components in any field of your request: useful for pointing to values from other requests, previous responses (parsing is done on the fly, no need to refresh), which is useful if you want to send back an auth token returned by a previous request. Dynamic values can do also stuff like MD5/SHA hashes, HMAC, URL/hex/base64 encode, timestamps, randomizers (Chance.js, JSON schema faker) with no code required (you can write custom JS snippets too if ever needed). For example, we once demo'ed the Algolia guys that their custom HMAC-based signature for client-side search was doable with no code. So, if you have the need, you can do custom stuff easily. Also, extensions (many are built by users) are bringing lots of extra features we would have not thought about ourselves: https://paw.cloud/extensions/ https://paw.cloud/extensions/ Environment variables in Paw can be nested or computed (with "dynamic values" described above). It can be useful, for example, to have an "Auth" variable that contains a pointer that accesses the "user.access_token" JSON path from inside the latest Login request, so you can later simply point to the "Auth" variable everywhere else. One other thing about envs, is that you can have independent groups of environments: a typical example is you have a "Server" group with envs called "Prod", "Staging", "Local" and independently a setup with user credentials or variables that are more like static globals (AWS Keys, etc.)… Now regarding to the team syncing service, "Paw for Teams". It has branches, snapshots and full history. In a dev team, it means one dev can experiment stuff on the schema for API v2 while others are fixing bugs on API v1, and when API v2 is ready they can seamlessly merge the new updates back to the v1 branch. Also, we've made the choice not to be real-time synced, because it doesn't fit well to software development: when I'm experimenting stuff with an API I don't want others to be polluted by my temporary garbage. So instead you "commit" changes only when ready. More about Teams here: https://paw.cloud/teams https://paw.cloud/teams Last but not least, Paw locally encrypts with a randomly generated symmetric passphrase all credentials you enter in your projects, that means your server keys, access tokens, etc. are a lot safer. And now that you can (optionally) sync with Paw's backend, we certainly don't want to have your secrets in cleartext on our infra. As passphrases are never uploaded (obviously! but by default stored in OS X Keychain), it's the users responsibility to safeguard them and share them with their team (on 1Password or similar).

polytap 10y ago

I couldn't upvote this enough. The lack of objective comparison in comments is astounding, and it fits a pattern.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

I actually like this pattern. I mean, as a (not so highly paid) developer who also does a lot of personal/hobby programming, I'm evaluating and using a ton of tools every year. If I were to ignore the free alternatives, I would be utterly broke now. Sure, if something is a product I'll be using day-in, day-out for the foreseeable future, I'll happily shell out $quite-a-lot. But if I expect to use it for half a day every three months or so, I'll look for something free. Like, e.g. I do some amount of vector drawing for random reasons (designing t-shirts for myself, logos for my projects, user interfaces, whatever) - enough to figure out Inkscape, not enough to justify buying Illustrator.