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Postman raises $225M Series D at $5.6B valuation
- 1-6 5y agoAlthough I love Postman and I want to see it succeed, I'm a little stumped when it comes to how this company can scale given its niche.
- tsjq 5y agogradually start tightening the noose on the free tier. enterprises would be forced to pay.
- 1-6 5y agoWhat eventually will happen is that someone will get fed up and build an open-source alternative on Github. Rinse, repeat.
- option_greek 5y agoInsomnia is already pretty good. Other alternatives are also present that cater to basic usage (most of them as browser plugins).
- zkldi 5y agoCan vouch for insomnia, have been using it for a long time now and it's been great.
- madmax108 5y agoIn-somnia is in-credible... And allowing import from postman collections means I've never once looked back. Postman is quickly trending towards bloatware, where _most_ people just want it for is for a GUI for curl and to share APIs across teams, but Postman becomes more and more bloated with "enterprise" features to justify valuations, while losing focus on the core demo that first adopted it! [1]: https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/ (hattip for the domain name as well ;) )
- bdjddd77bnd 5y agoThey did their is insomnia iirc and another one. And script friendly stuff like httpie. And ide stuff like httpclient. That's stupidly high valuation
- bdjddd77bnd 5y agoHoly shit I thought the valuation was stupidly high at 225m, now Ive reread 5.6b, that's more than fastly market cap ffs insanity
- rocmcd 5y agoThe space is already crowded, though (many of them being open source), for example Insomnia, Paw, Fiddler, Hoppscotch, and even Thunder Client (a VS Code extension). I suspect that the Postman investors are privy to information that warrant the investment (plus the economic climate being what it is).
- bdjddd77bnd 5y agoCharles proxy too (paid)
- pjmlp 5y agoThere are already quite a few, a JavaFX for those with Electron allergy and there are VSCode plugins for the Electron lovers. For the rest of us there is curl and Powershell Web-Request.
- namelessoracle 5y agoIt's a GUI around curl commands. Any enterprise company could trivially spin up a team to build an open source tool that does 80 percent of its use cases.
- Ansil849 5y ago> Any enterprise company could And yet...don't?
- throw_nbvc1234 5y agoCompany i used to work for just hired a few part-time interns to build and maintain a custom version of Postman. Auto-generated web-forms based on the underlying service code. Then would offer those interns full time jobs on graduation and hire new interns to continue maintaining the project (with any ex-intern full-timers able to jump in and/or advice as needed).
- tofuahdude 5y ago"Its just X around Y" is actually a very common multi-billion dollar solution/business. > could trivially spin up a team Or they could trivially pay for a 100% solution w/o having to lose focus on what they actually do.
- ApolloFortyNine 5y agoIs there not already a 100% open source solution? This is one of those cases where a good dev could likely build a clone in a month. And it hardly needs constant updates.
- tofuahdude 5y ago> where a good dev could likely build a clone in a month. And it hardly needs constant updates. I wish I had $5 / user / yr for every person who says this about products! Kidding aside, I think this dramatically underestimates what it takes to build a product that solves the problems that Postman solves. "Curl has no gui" isn't the problem they're solving.
- tommoor 5y agoThe valuation is eye-popping, does anyone have a reasonable explanation of how that could be sustained?
- The_Beta 5y agoToo much money floating around amongst funds
- Canada 5y agoI have to second this comment... I really like the Postman software (I don't use it with an account). I really want to understand how this kind of valuation can be justified.
- baybal2 5y agoPrinting presses switching into high gear around the world. LBO shops follow. Money have never been cheaper, ever
- connoljo 5y agoVCs really like bottom up SAAS
- defaulty 5y ago> bottom up SAAS What does that mean? Is there a top down SAAS?
- ren_engineer 5y agolol, revenue not even mentioned on the page. Seems like an absurd valuation but times are crazy and VCs are throwing money anywhere they can my only guess is that they raised based on their user count and have pitched some sort of strategy to monetize based on that. I'm guessing it is B2B focus, maybe some platform to make it easier for SaaS API companies to get to users. Or just pure enterprise sales and try to get big companies to pay for it. Maybe even try to monetize the data about what APIs free tier developers are using, although that type of telemetry would probably piss off most their users I just don't see developers paying for Postman directly, there are decent open source alternatives.
- echelon 5y ago> VCs are throwing money anywhere they can How do you meet VCs or find good ones? Do you hunt them down? Do you suggest a valuation for investment?
- alangibson 5y agoStart Googling. You'll find many hundreds of blog posts and podcasts about this. If all else fails, start listening to This Week In Startups.
- cvhashim 5y agoNetworking
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoYou don't have to guess. You only had to go to their pricing page [0] to find out what they are selling. 0. https://www.postman.com/pricing/ https://www.postman.com/pricing/
- throwthere 5y agoI’ve totally had the why not just use curl moment a la the famous Dropbox quote. But man developer tool saas in general are on fire with growth and outright command these type of valuations. Congratulations to the postman team!
- devoutsalsa 5y agoI do like how Postman can both import & export cURL requests.
- delecti 5y agoLeaving aside their valuation, profit, or ability to scale (which other comments have brought up), what could they possibly need that much money for?
- dharmab 5y agoIf you look at their feature matrix they seem to plan to expand from a deveolpment tool to a general purpose API tooling/monitoring platform: https://www.postman.com/pricing/ https://www.postman.com/pricing/
- kissgyorgy 5y agoIf you find Postman too bloated, a great alternative is Insomnia (https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/) which is very similar when Postman just started; a simple, very useful tool without all the corporate bullshit and lots of unnecessary paid features packed in Electron.
- pjmlp 5y agoYep, hence why they are pushing everyone to subscription based use, and some features now only work with an account.
- muttantt 5y agoI can't help but think all these crazy raises and valuations that keep jumping from round to round are just a scheme to legally print money.
- orliesaurus 5y agoI don't know anyone personally that pays for Postman...anyone here pays for it? I've used many times Postman, in the past, but never paid. In comparison I pay and have paid for Github for a long time though, and know plenty of people who also do either through personal/work
- curtis3389 5y agoI used to love Postman, but with their recent updates, it has become nearly useless for work. They've clearly made it cumbersome to collaborate with collections via git so that you have to pay for their service, and the cost of the service is too high to justify what it does. I don't think the cloud service route was the correct one for monetizing Postman. I think they should have left basic HTTP support at the free tier and then offered feature parity w/ curl and testing at paid tiers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- danpalmer 5y agoIt always amuses me that Postman's branding is all space themed. I realise the "post" in Postman is likely a reference to the HTTP POST verb, but wouldn't it have made more sense to go postal (ha) for their branding instead of space? Feels like such a missed opportunity.
- alangibson 5y agoMy jaw hit the floor when I saw $5.6B. Valuations have been crazy for a while, but that kind of money for an OK-ish developer tool is bonkers in any world. Weber Grills just went public at a similar valuation. It's truly amazing that a global household name would go for the same price as a niche tool that is optional to pay for.
- outside1234 5y agoYou have got to be kidding me. What's the pitch? Spyware? Send the returned JSON data to the Chinese?
- aphroz 5y agoI would pay a small one time fee for a good collection that would save me the time having to read the documentation. The API collection store could allow developers to create and sell their collection. They could also have sponsored links, you could target people with specific needs.