But you raised VC funding right?

Insomnia was an alternative to Postman, raised VC funds, eventually needed to justify that, and suddenly accounts mattered more. They're currently on the same trajectory.

Insomnia is open source but just like OP experienced, a single update can do damage and it takes time for the community to react.

Is this the same company that raised? If so, are you exempt from that? Have you figured out some monetization scheme for what is essentially a glorified curl UI that doesn't incentivize account sign ups?

I wish tech product managers could get it through their skulls: creating and maintaining yet-another-account for yet-another-app is high friction and undesirable. If you're going to give me an ultimatum where I need to either create an account or stop using the app. 99% of the time I'm just going to stop using your app.

If it's just a "glorified curl UI" what's the problem? Just use curl, or build your own, if it's so trivial.

You are kicking the tires awfully hard for a solution to a problem you claim is easy.

That’s actually what I do and did. I have a whole bunch of scripts that allow me to replicate a lot of what Postman did for me.

The problem with these VC companies is that they enter the market with a whole bunch of lies and I was convinced that building on my ad hoc scripts wasn’t very useful since there were multiple alternatives including open source ones.

It’s taken me a decade however to learn that if these projects are VC backed as opposed to having some sort of govt or heck, even a benevolent dictator, they will screw you.

And while I might have learnt this lesson, which so much of the knowledge ecosystem also being filled with VC backed individuals (including this very forum) a whole another generation of potential OS developers will learn the lesson also too late.

And that’s how Silicon Valley has built a massive eco system to suck money out of everything across the globe, especially open source, but not limited to it (taxis, restaurants, hoteling, everything…).

I think it's fair to criticize them given a fair number of alternatives in this thread (with their own shortcomings). It's kind of silly to post something to hackernews and not expect criticism.

Your defensiveness would be better justified if I was concerned about the curl wrapper... and not the VC firms seeking 10x returns attached to said wrapper

Postman is also open source lol. Unless its donation driven without funding its all going to be the same.

It's not open source, only some of the components are.

Can't someone just locally fork one of these apps and use it forever without updating it? What's actually different about manually poking APIs from one week to the next?

Well even curl has a high severity CVE pending announcement, updates aren't always bad!

https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1709103920914526525

Did you read my comment? (Also Postman is not open source, it just has some open source pieces)

Disappointing that there isn't a standalone program like Postman. I don't want to install an extension in my browser to handle CORS.

Didn't Postman start as an extension?

What's the issue with an extension?

I don't particularly enjoy a VC-fueled project having ability to intercept all my browser traffic to handle CORS.

Having a dedicated browser profile is a good solution to this if you’re ever uncomfortable with a particular extension.

Running standalone binaries by a VC-fueled project on your host is even worse.

I guess a separate quarantine browser profile is the best of both worlds?

Ah, I follow. I was confused because a small, open-source extension should be sufficient to handle sending test requests. Sounds like they're doing something much bigger than that.

POSTman started as an extension; hence my confusion. I was wondering if there was a technical issue I was unaware of.

It's a non-starter for me if it requires an extension. I also think it's a matter of time before it goes the Insomnia/Postman route. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

It says on the page the the extension 'enhances the experience ' - it doesn't look like a requirement.

Enhances? Isn't the point to override CORs because the browser will automatically block certain requests. Seems like a pretty critical feature unless all you have are GET requests.