You know the reason. A bunch of people were able to take home a lot of money because of that growth and now have the option to FIRE themselves whenever they want to shake off the stress.

That's the founder mentality that Y Combinator exists to leverage or encourage and it's ubiquity is what separates the prevailing 21st century technology movement from the nerdy, academic, UNIX-y movement that gave us GNU, linux, curl, ffmpeg, redis, etc

We got to watch innovative products get pumped full of helium until they explode with bloat and rent-seeking instead of accumulating a growing foundation of sturdy technical building blocks as we could have had on the other path.

AI now leads us into some new movement, the worst version of which a few model vendors protected by regulations absorb almost all technical accomplishment and lease it back out to everybody else, and the best version of which democratizes technical construction so widely that individuals can naively spin up effective solutions for the most idiosyncratic needs.

We'll see how it goes.

All those people who gave them millions in funding are expecting to make a return on that investment and that means prioritizing turning it into something that will make money by selling out users. The valuation is just a guess at how successful it will be at screwing users over. Greed ruins everything.

Because, current valuations are completely detached from any operational or market realities that affect a company. The metric has become the goal, and the metric is controlled by nontechnical people that have no intuitive understanding of how technical products are used. Even worse, they’ve all gone though a vibe coding tutorial and now either believe they have real technical depth, or believe that it doesn’t matter.

There’s apparently a surprisingly profitable enterprise afterlife to developer tools that manage to become popular in the right moment, even if the moment is fairly short.

I do know business analysts, testers, non-technical people asking me for postman collections.

Postman became de-facto standard for businesses. Even though devs have ditched it.

Nowadays Portman is forbidden for project delivery, unless the customer development team also uses it.

Wtf!! how

The good thing is that now takes about 2 days to replicate with an agent the parts that matter from their whole offering and tell them to go f themselves.

I have no need for it, but there's one company I work with and all of their developers still use it. What do you do/recommend instead?

Its endemic in enterprise engineering/QA, for all the reasons we mourn its loss its big, and big is trusted in these circles

Also if you have an alternative that's easier to use, I'm interested

I think most people here on HN is within or close by the "Innovators" part of the "Technology adoption life cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle). When Postman hit mainstream, it was already bloated and ruined, and "Innovators" had already moved on to something else, but for Postman that's just the beginning, as they're in the "Early Majority" part, and still have a tail to ride, so investors and everyone else can extract all the value from the remaining s̶u̶c̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ users.

Just out of curiosity, what are developers using these days?

I’ve been considering setting up a nonprofit solely to do this and to republish things like Mattermost, Stats, Bitwarden, etc with the corporate antifeatures ripped out.

B2B maybe? Usually these businesses thrive solely on flirting with the CTO and getting them to sign a lucrative contract and then mandate internal usage. I'm speaking from experience.

In an utlimate twist of irony such a tool could itself pivot to investors because the moment it gets really bad is also the moment to invest in the competition.

I'm not saying that's my strategy with Bugsink, but I'm not saying it isn't either.

So imagine that I hear about this "Postman" product that involves subscriptions, and AI, and "valued at $X billion" and all this crap, and you can see how I seriously thought that there was another product called "Postman" that wasn't the product I used to use. Turns out...

Im simply envious that I dont own an AI-native cloud-first enterprise-grade zero-trust secure-by-design API lifecycle management ecosystem powered by agentic AI workflows autonomous coding agents pre built skills context graphs semantic knowledge retrieval augmented generation multi agent collaboration next generation developer productivity acceleration platform with a revolutionary cURL GUI client valued at 5 billion dollars with 1500 employees

Like statistics, 90% of valuations are totally made-up.

It is crazy what people manage to raise funds for.

People should be using curl + bash. It's a universal combination available almost everywhere.

... what the fuck. Certainly explains things

> I still don't know how they're valued at $5B+ when I don't know a single developer who actually uses it anymore

Yep, one of them. I loved Postman but gone back to plain cURL and the dogshit that is IntelliJ's built-in HTTP request tool.

As for the question... easy. Markets can stay irrational for a very long time...

Um.

... for.... .... postman?

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Did you flag it / create an issue?

https://blog.postman.com/postman-is-hipaa-compliant/

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50359814

They offer a paid version though, so I'm always afraid it's going to enshittify in the future, just like Postman and then Insomnia did.

It was stuck at

  daniel@Daniel-ThinkPad:~/Downloads$ ./Kreya-linux-x64.AppImage

I think https://httpie.io is also in the category (I have only used it in CLI form, long back. My use cases don't need anything more than curl)

You can’t have a unicorn valuation built on a simple offline client.

This is basically standard SV play book - first step is „fix“ it to have a cloud component/account. Then store some of the data in cloud only - say for example for team sharing or a „workspace“. Then make some features paid only. Then ramp up the enshitification till metrics show it’s saturated and users will bear no more

There's also one available as a major mode for Emacs: https://melpa.org/#/restclient

If the command line is acceptable but you want more of a focus on usability than curl has, there's httpie (https://httpie.io/) and its clone xh (https://github.com/ducaale/xh).

relevant article

It's like saying cars are obsolete now because you only used yours to go to the church and use your bike for that now

Don't know about Postman, but Bruno has much more to offer. In our team we use an exported shared collection (stored in github) of all the extensive APIs of all the apps we share or even those we just use so that anyone can just import that and use them

Older versions are fine, though.

https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/discussions/6590

Bruno [1] is the current better alternative to Insomnia.

[1] https://www.usebruno.com/

Works well enough without getting in my way.

The biggest "Oh my god, this is so much easier" moment was just setting up a tiny JS script onto the login API to stash the bearer token from the return response into a variable, and then propagate it into the header of all subsequent calls. Trying to script THAT in Bash (parsing the bearer token from the return response) was also a headache and never worked 100% for me.

Although that was me trying to do it manually. I'm sure a vibe-coded solution would probably work well enough these days.

Personally I use a wrapper cli I built myself over curl which automatically gets api docs of my product and easily get the token so its great for agents

Nice to see the leaner alternatives people are suggesting here.

As I've mentioned in other posts, I'm a former Postmanaut who built it as a response to the lack of options for agents on the market.

Haven't heard of Bruno until now. Looks like a solid offline-first tool. I don't see a public collection or web runner, and it looks like it supports GitHub-based sharing. Postman on the other hand, their public API network (or whatever they call it) along with the web runner reduce a lot of friction for API vendors like us and for dev teams who just want to quickly play with the API in the browser, especially during their evaluation stage.

I suspect that nearly every single public corporation are likely overpaying for software products, it's a waste of capital and extremely inefficient. All it shows is that corporations are too loose with their money and can probably deserve to get their tax obligations increased by a good 20-40% if they're this okay with wasting it.

Or just give your agent JSON and tell it to use curl

https://httpyac.github.io/

Since it's all in plain text it's easy to share in a repo.

Sannr is an API platform built for coding agents that builds API context over time.

It is still fully native (real native, not fake web-driver native).

At this point I do not see why the entirety of their software could not be a one shot prompt for the price of deer nuts.

Most of the YC companies are loan backed with investors pushing milestones for the next investment chunk or round.