Curious to know more about the commercial licensing scheme for Yaak: if i’ve read correctly, purchasing a pro license if based on « good faith » as the features are exactly the same as the MIT licensed Hobby version?

Sincere question, been studying lots of OSS commercial licensing and always wonder what works in which context

This is a conscious bet I'm making.

Yes, it's a good-faith license. The license doesn't even apply to the OSS version (only prebuilt binaries).

The bet is that super fans will pay for it in the early days and, as it gets adopted by larger companies, they will pay in order to comply with the legalities of commercial use. So far, it's working! The largest company so far is 34 seats, with a couple more in the pipe!

Having often thought this is how I would attempt to monetize if I built a developer tool, I'm glad to hear that it's working.

It makes good sense because companies actually have an absurd amount of liability to you if they violate your agreement.

Without telemetry, how will you know that anyone at all is using your software let alone only within the agreement of any licensing terms?

You don't - ergo good faith.

You can be an Oracle and audit your customers and develop that adversarial relationship. The idea is that that sort of thing makes you rot in the long run.

How's that been going for Oracle so far?

Everyone of their executives can look forward to 10,000 years of burning in hell, so I’d say pretty badly

They may earn money but are totally rotten. They eat injured souls.

Pretty poorly actually, people avoid Oracle products like the plague. Nobody is buying a JVM from Oracle or buying their DB - they're using open source solutions that are both free and provide more features.

They have a lot of inerita, but that's it. If you're in Greenfield development, there is a close to 0% chance you will choose Oracle as your RDBMS.

Um, oops.

Hey, personally I agree. Why would I ever go with Oracle.

But that's A) me personally and B) me in Cloud/Startup type companies, so of course we don't got with Oracle.

But like you mentioned, inertia. So my previous gigs that were large multi-national of course were all Oracle. And they were all huge and had zero reason to not just buy the Oracle tax. Which is why Oracle is going strong.

Despite all the rage, Oracle can still survive quite some time on running boring things like I don't know, many large banks and other boring old businesses. Which of those is really gonna go "AWS Aurora MySQL" when the have had an in-house "Oracle Exadata" run their entire business operation "just fine" for longer than those Cloud providers have even be around?

I am sure everyone making shareware in the early 1990's would have loved to spy on people to know how many used their software for free (and have a way to spam those users to try to sell more licenses), but they couldn't and just did without that.

Excellent work! Looking forward your post about some milestone ARR boundary, the gory details of how you got there.

My runway reaches infinity around $10k MRR so I'll likely do a post around then. Currently 11% of the way there!

I was going to gripe about the price but $50/dev/year is actually pretty reasonable! Nice!

I really like that, a scaling license!

I have a suggestion:

Under pricing for the hobby tier you could add as free or pay what you want. $50/yr isn't crazy but might get a few smaller donations if that was an avenue.

I currently direct these people to sponsor on GitHub

Thank you for your honest and detailed answer! Great to see it’s working so far and this allows you to build a true OSS product in the meantime, i really appreciate that (i think this is the biggest benefit of your licensing scheme)

If I asked my security team could I use yaak, they would (probably) say yes, and legal would say under no circumstances am I to use a personal license, they will pay for a commercial license. Large companies are incredibly risk averse when it comes to stuff like this.

Been using Yaak for 6-9 months now, initially built from source, but now a paying subscriber. Recently saw that you post open metrics[1] on subscriber count and revenue, and love getting a little look behind the curtains.

[1]: https://yaak.app/open

Nice! Yep, trying to be as open and accessible as possible since so much of the industry is the opposite.

I fell in love with Insomnia pre-acquisition so I'm thrilled to see it has a spiritual successor. Good on you Greg.

I was so sad to see its decline after I left. Had to make it right.

So you sold insomnia, sold it, and then created another competing tool? There where no restrictions in the deal?

Non-competes expire

I love a solo dev building from scratch is going up against an entire team and company who have years of head start, alot more money and a product that the solo dev originally wrote for them.

And the solo dev has a better product already and might actually win haha.

Underdog story.

Rooting for you!

Ya, it's so funny to be going up against a 1000+ person company as a solo dev!

Underdog? More like topdog!

Very cool.

Can you provide clarity on is a commercial license is needed. The license appears to be MIT but the yaak.app website gives the impression a license is required, even stating as such in FAQ.

The commercial license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run the OSS version for whatever purpose you'd like. Check the last FAQ on the pricing page

You should consider updating your free license to allow some time period of professional use, otherwise it's not possible to evaluate it at work without violating the license.

You get a 30-day trial

It's possible if you build from source, even in the commercial environment. As the last item in the pricing page says, the license only applies to the prebuilt binaries.

I was looking at Yaak, and wondering if you've plans to bring it inside VS Code some day?

how would someone use this in a project that operates within VS Code Remote where the source sits on a remote server and isn't physically on the file system.

No plans for VSCode integration, no. It's only great because it's designed for a very specific use case and environment.

I'm not quite sure why Yaak wouldn't work in this case. It it because your running server wouldn't be accessible to Yaak, running on your system?

In case you aren’t familiar (and with apologies for my verbosity if you are): VSCode Remote can be best understood as a sort of hybrid of a local text editor and a remote web-based or X11 view of an editor for a remote session.

When you use a remote, the code is on the remote and all your editing functions (search, version control, terminal, extensions) happen in the remote via a worker process.

So in a remote session, everything is “local” to the remote. You may have no file “mount” of the thing at all on your host desktop machine. If you do a git commit, it’s running inside/on the remote. If you do a file search the files are searched on the remote, rather than downloading them over some network filesystem and searching locally.

The GP’s point is, I think: if you implemented Yaak as a VSCode extension, it could be made to function either in a local session or inside a remote (on a server accessed via SSH, a docker container, on the linux side of WSL etc.) and therefore have fast rather than slow access to the code, git repo etc.

I do essentially all my dev work (apart from compiling the odd mac app) inside remotes of various kinds to create reproducible environments, avoid cluttering the host, sandbox the tools, give me freedom to work from more than one machine etc., and I run into this sort of thing quite a bit.

There are at least two clients like this for VSCode —- Thunder Client and EchoAPI, and I believe both function in a remote session.

P.S. I loved Insomnia before the bad happened; it really helped with learning APIs. Thanks.

probably too much work for a solo dev

The REST Book extension was made by a VS Code dev and does a decent enough chunk of what is needed, at least for simple use cases.

Handy Dandy Notebook as well, but that requires some reformulation to get everything in terms of standard curl/node/python/etc commands. (whether that’s better or worse than a custom http dsl is a matter of some debate)

Also: httpBook - Rest Client

Wrote this late at night and didn’t explain what I meant by X11 view.

I was thinking back to running X sessions on remote machines, sending for example a text editor view back across the network to my desktop.

VSCode remote feels to my fiftysomething brain to be logically quite like that, only you are sending the display back from the remote worker using web techniques, and rather than to a display manager, you are sending it back into the shell of an editor, so it appears to be largely indistinguishable from a session running on your local machine.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I think what you want already exists as VSCodes remote SSH tunnel port forwarding (not the one that makes it publicly accessible).

Startup a dev server on the remote machine and forward the port to localhost. It should now be accessible via http://localhost:[port] on your local machine in the browser or any application, as if it’s running locally.

I find it’s very useful for also for interacting with DBs/Redis. Just forward the port your DB communicates on and use whatever client on your local machine to interact with it.

As far as I know this works with any service that communicates via TCP

Yeah, it would help with using the tool to access a private-to-the-remote API.

Won't immediately help with giving that tool access to the file system or Git.

For a local VM, you can have file system mounts, fast enough for Git.

SSHFS could help in some genuinely distant remotes with access to the file system (though SSHFS in the context of multiple file writers is fraught with risk of file corruption; been there, bought that T-shirt).

With properly network-remote VMs, nothing helps that much with giving the tool access to performing Git operations on changes inside your remote: Git is slow over network file systems even when they are quite local.

This is the real power of the VS Code remote after all; everything happens there.

You're already going down the path Postman did. No way I'm using that.

How so? It's completely open source and doesn't rely on cloud accounts or servers. It's also just me. Postman has 1000 employees and $200M+ in funding

you use it until he fucks it up and then switch to the next guy.

These api clients are rocket science, the barrier for entry is very low.

This is my retirement project. I'd like to call it "done" within 2 years

off topic, sorry: Looking at the docs and I don't find a quick answer. I really want an API client that will do OAuth and handle token refresh, and I haven't found one. The use case is that (obviously) I control the redirect URI, so I'd like to map it back to client (some kind of proxy that I run and make external with all of the requisite DNS and TLS) or maybe via a hosted service (which I'm willing to accept for the convenience.)

I haven't used postman or insomnia in a while since they went to the cloud, so I could just be missing it, but that's also a non-starter for me.

Yaak does this out of the box. It pops open a browser window and intercepts any redirect. And auto refresh is built in as well.

Awesome. Downloaded. Thanks!

Enjoy!

RapidAPI (ex. Paw) does that AFAIK.

Also, it’s an amazing app.

Still mad about the boring rebrand from Paw but it is still a nice app

was going to say "what makes this better than Insomnia" before i saw this!

> Having created and sold Insomnia in 2019

Hahah, ya... :)

Hey Greg!

Hey! Who's this?

Hey thanks, this looks great. I'm still on Paw but I've been looking for something new since it's been languishing as "RapidAPI" for years.

Just noticed that with my star on GitHub it now has over 9000 stars!

No way. Queue the gif!

Clearly there should be a super useful widget in the interface that prominently displays the number of GitHub stars !

This looks great. If you can wait 8 years before you sell out, that should be long enough for me to retire. Give me a headsup if they offer you a billion earlier so I can start looking for Yaak's replacement.

I've already sold once, and regretted it. I'm aiming to call Yaak "done" in the next few years and use it to fund my* retirement. See you there

Thanks for making this. May this stay un-enshittified by VC money for a very long time.

Yep, no VC! Though I have invested 2 years of my own living expenses into it, trying to make it work.

That Hotdog theme is stunning but I'm not sure if I mean "it's beautiful" or "it makes my head hurt."

One thing I despise about postman is how much friction there is to creating a new request. In my line of work, I'm often using an API client as a scratch pad to validate /poc. At the same time, it would be nice to just have a simple "history" that I could go back and search if I needed to find some request I made a few weeks ago.

Currently using Bruno. Saw your comparison. If Bruno has everything I need, what would you say is your biggest benefit compared to Bruno?

Faster, smoother, GRPC, plugins, themes, fully open source, no telemetry,...

Thanks! I will try it out. Looks awesome. Bruno also supports grpc, though. Also, in what way is Yaak more open source than bruno?

Nice!

Hey, happy user of Yaak here, thanks for building this. Wish you success and peace.

This looks awesome! I've been wondering what to do with Insomnia since its enshittification.

One idea: since you are doing good-faith licenses anyway, maybe you could add in the possibility to pay for some kind of one-time license? I don't particularly need or want updates from my API tool, I just want it to work and not break. I would be fine with paying a one time commercial license that gives non expiring right to use a particular version.

I think this is covered by lifetime fallback license, under pricing->FAQ - but not sure, seems so.

Yep, that's what the fallback is for

Ah, fantastic! Thanks again.

Quick request, if it's doable: would you mind making a portable version of this? We're super locked down on our machines (even as developers), and all programs that need to be installed need to be approved. Portable programs fly under the radar, so they're easier to try discreetly, then we can make an official request to get them approved or buy a license.

Edit: oh my, you also made Insomnia, that I used when Postman was on the enshittification path...

First time hearing about this app, sounds like it totally fits my use case. Gotta give it a try!

Hey Greg! Can you clarify that building from source and using in a commerical environment is permissable under the MIT license? I have built from source and yet the program is under "trial mode" currently and looks to have a 30 day ticker of doom. Is this a bug? Is there a flag missing? I cannot find any detailed instructions on setting flags or environment variables to turn this off.

Thanks!

How are you running it? The code for the license management and badge are not included by default when running "npm start" or "npm run app-build".

And yes, you can indeed run the OSS yourself for commercial purposes.

I built a binary using the `tauri.release.conf.json` as my config file

That'll do it. That config is used for the production build of Yaak that's downloadable from the website. Just running "tauri build" or "npm run app-build" is what you want.

Hey @gschier this is awesome. I've been a long time user of Insomnia and since the acquisition it's ever so slowly, well... it's been a challenge for me.

I didn't know you created Yaak!

I just downloaded Yaak and it's been awesome, thank you!

I downloaded this through AUR on Arch and one bit of feedback is that I wish you'd make the sig verification a whole bunch easier, thanks!