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Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing
- Edmond 7y agoFor a more full feature set product there is APIMolder: https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/ https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/ You get a mock server OOTB.
- dang 7y agoThe 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- UnbugMe 7y agoIf your team is using solely Mac, it's now more expensive than using [Paw](1). (1): https://paw.cloud/ https://paw.cloud/
- rvz 7y agoExactly this. I don't see why I should be billed annually for using a managed HTTP client. Given that, Paw sounds better equipped for my personal API development needs all for a one time payment.
- snapetom 7y agoI really like Paw. The interface is much cleaner than Postman. Postman has more group sharing features, but otherwise, Paw matches Postman's other features pretty well.
- kstrauser 7y agoI do too. It's in my toolbox of "things I rarely use, but when I need it, it's my favorite thing in the world".
- ljm 7y agoPaw’s fantastic, and a great example of a native Mac app. I’d really like to see something similar in Windows.
- akuji1993 7y agoI 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.
- ardeay 7y agoMakes me consider the other options now. It use to be best for the dollar.
- patrickaljord 7y agoThere's also PostWoman for free (no affiliation): https://postwoman.io/ https://postwoman.io/ https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman
- TAForObvReasons 7y ago*Free and Open Source (MIT license)
- reallydontask 7y agoI feel that we need a new app called postperson :)
- momentmaker 7y agopostdude :)
- thanatropism 7y agoPost-humanism is a thing.
- scolson 7y agoWorth 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://postwoman.io/ https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman
- ossworkerrights 7y agoOh look a free clone of a commercial product, let's all jump on it and undermine the devs of postman and insomnia, whom have escaped the 9 to 5 by building awesome tools, because that's what we do: we kill indie development with free clones of small projects.
- Spivak 7y agoOr ya know, since we’re all software developers and many of us need/want a tool like this we could collectively build a community version that we distribute freely and split the labor cost of development and maintenance among the people who use and contribute to it.
- ossworkerrights 7y agoyeah let's all split those 8$ it costs, because that's what will get us out of the grind. 8$ a month is less than two coffees, if you need to split such costs among peers then you're probably in the wrong job.
- lm28469 7y ago> 8$ a month is less than two coffees You can buy 1kg of coffee beans with that.
- save_ferris 7y agoYou're complaining about the very thing that allows OSS to exist.
- 7y ago
- rc_kas 7y agoGood for them if their customer base is so strong that they can do this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- __erik 7y agoIf anyone is looking to switch, I've far preferred using Insomnia to Postman https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/
- fjp 7y agoI 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
- AznHisoka 7y agoI 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...
- gschier 7y agoYou can view your history in the top right of the response pane
- lwansbrough 7y agoIt does. Check the right side panel above the response. There’s a history icon (I think it may be next to the response time? Not at my computer.)
- AznHisoka 7y agoOh wow. First time I found out about that. Then it's clear: Insomnia is 100X better than that bloated Postman!
- lliamander 7y agoDoes 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.
- Numberwang 7y agocurl is all you need.
- chasingthewind 7y agoPostman 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.
- ericwooley 7y agoIt would be great for a competitive app that commits you're collection in your version control. Syncing collections is a solved problem that postman resolved so they could charge for it.
- sdan 7y agoOne 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.
- mrnaught 7y agoI work with lot of APIS (our team owns atleast 30 of them) switching between different environments and have found Paw (https://paw.cloud/ https://paw.cloud/) more productive than postman.
- bovermyer 7y agoWhy not just use curl?
- jiofih 7y ago$360/year per developer, to manage manual HTTP request testing locally. Sure.
- joe8756438 7y agoFor the emacs users out there: restclient.el is pretty amazing. There is a similar library for vscode with the same name.
- sebazzz 7y agoAn I the only one using Fiddler?
- ardeay 7y agoIt 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.
- sdoering 7y ago> 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.
- JaggedJax 7y agoThey have confirmed the free version is sticking around the same as today. They are just telling people who are considering upgrading to the paid version that if you do it right away you can lock in the old rates for 1 year.
- smokey_thompson 7y agoI 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. https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/
- Edmond 7y agoFull feature set alternative, APIMolder: https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/ https://codesolvent.com/api-molder/ Mock server OOTB and a bunch of other goodies.
- skrowl 7y agohttps://insomnia.rest/ 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 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 7y agohttps://postwoman.io/ https://postwoman.io/ is also great for simple use cases (and is MIT licensed https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman)
- miket 7y agoSeconded on Insomnia - I switched to it when encountering a bug in the encoding of the curl command generation in Postman, and haven't looked back.
- fjcero 7y agoWorks as well with GraphQL support added https://postwoman.io/ https://postwoman.io/. Also, https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/ is great Also for automated testing in APIs https://dredd.org/en/latest/ 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.
- oauea 7y agoThe entire concept of that postwoman thing is utterly broken. Have they never heard of cross origin restrictions?
- AndrewStephens 7y agoYes, they have heard about cross origin restrictions. Postwoman gets around them by having an (optional) proxy that actually makes the request on the users behalf. Whether or not you think this is a good idea is another matter, but it works.
- remote_phone 7y agoCompanies 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.
- ttul 7y agoSoftware 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.
- fxleach 7y ago"...years of blasting away money in favor of growth-at-all-costs" - Maybe those companies should go under?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Nextgrid 7y agoI'm surprised nobody mentioned https://paw.cloud https://paw.cloud. It's a Postman alternative that's native (no Electron/Javascript garbage) with a simple one-time-purchase pricing model.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago+1 Paw
- gmaster1440 7y agoDoesn't seem like it supports Windows, so in many people's case (including mine) not a viable alternative. Otherwise looks like a great product.
- lowdose 7y agoI don't know any dev on a Windows setup, it's either Linux or MacOS. So this is a very serious question and I even up voted you out of interest. Do you own the admin rights to your dev work setup?
- penagwin 7y agoI know of (and have done) development windows before. Especially with WSL and docker, things like a django application aren't _too_ problematic once you get around some of the quirks. It's not perfect but it does work for a lot of web app development. You still have VSCode/Intellij, etc. Not to mention all those who develop windows applications.
- davidwparker 7y agoI recently switched to Windows w/WSL after ~9 years on OSX, and ~7 years before that on Linux. It's been challenging in some regards, but it mostly just works. It's also been a breath of fresh air. I've found paying the Apple tax just not worth it anymore (riddled with bugs and paying a lot more for the same level of hardware). Note: I have admin rights.
- Semaphor 7y ago
- tus88 7y agoCurl is free man.
- yepthatsreality 7y agoExactly my thoughts. Free and not that hard to use. I guess $96/yr is a good trade off for some UI?
- penagwin 7y agoI enjoy testing HTTP endpoints by bit-banging an ethernet cable so that I don't have to buy a computer. In all seriousness - Regardless of the solution Postman/Postwomen/Insomnia/Paw/etc - People use these tools so they can easily manipulate any part of their query, without needing to lookup curl flags and nuances. Serious question: How do you construct complex curl requests? Do you do it all on the command line? Or you do it in a text editor? If you want to change the field of a form for your post request, how quickly can you change it? Curl is a great tool, but for sandbox-like usage it's just too clunky of a UX IMO.
- tus88 7y agoIt's all REST these days, sometimes with JSON payloads. Nothing too hard to mangle together.
- chasingthewind 7y agoI'm not defending them in the least (see my post on yesterday's discussion) but Postman isn't just a UI over curl. The primary value add is the ability to organize groups of related requests and then run them as part of a test suite and assert against the outcomes. It's essentially a test tool for REST APIs that's accessible to a less technical audience.
- vorpalhex 7y agoShout out to postwoman, https://github.com/liyasthomas/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.
- basseq 7y ago(Cross-posted from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831) 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.
- basseq 7y agoNote that the alternative here would be to just increase price by the full 12% and change nothing else. Then later you can cut features and price by 2%, which people won't react to because "paying less for less" is perfectly logical. Then those minority of customers who actually needed the 2% incremental features could buy them ad-hoc, and end up paying the same price. Albeit, this means that you now don't have pretty bundles, and are selling features à la carte, which can be hard to manage. OR you make all those customers upgrade to Enterprise, which they'll be pissed about, but still falls into the logical "paying more for more" optics.
- ningsla 7y agoSwitched to Insomnia and never look back.