Hacker News

points by Waterluvian 5 days ago | 0 comments

I replaced that garbage with Insomnia years back. I’m just waiting until I hear that Insomnia is also a problem and where to go next.

[–] mzajc 5 days ago

Insomnia 8.0 and above requires an account on their servers to use. The stated reason was that this makes it easier to advertise to you. No thanks.

Older versions are fine, though.

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

[–] tastyfreeze 4 days ago

Bruno is a serviceable replacement that is local first.

[–] skinfaxi 4 days ago

And the cycle continues...

[–] chamomeal 4 days ago

Curl UI wrappers are just the weirdest thing. They’re so popular, they offer so little (compared to other paid services), and they all have the same evolution of simple -> require account -> sell data.

They just all seem like things that developers would easily ditch. But up until now, I was also still stuck on postman because my team/org uses it as a knowledge repository. It’s just classic enshittification. They’re using high switching costs to make as much money as possible without everybody leaving. Who

[–] reddalo 4 days ago

Insomnia _has_ a problem, since it forces you to create a cloud account with them.

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

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

[–] Mashimo 4 days ago

Odd, on gitbub insomnia still states you don't need an account at all if you want to use local files.

[–] Keyframe 4 days ago

My path was: Postman -> Turns into shit -> Insomnia -> Turns into shit -> Bruno.. let's hope Bruno doesn't turn into shit.

[–] walthamstow 4 days ago

These days I would just vibe my own. There's nothing special about any of these software.

[–] Keyframe 4 days ago

fair point

[–] reddalo 4 days ago

If Bruno turns to shit, I hope that thanks to AI it's going to be easier for a new maintainer to step in and work on a fork

[–] amflare 5 days ago

I've been using Insomnia whenever I can since before Covid. Its been nice, but ever since they started pushing accounts so aggressively, I've switched to Yaak to get back to that feel of a simple API client that prompted me to switch to Insomia in the first place. 100% recommend. https://yaak.app/

[–] Waterluvian 4 days ago

That looks appealing but the existence of a Pricing page tells me it's just a matter of time.

I have a sense that a dumb Web API testing UI application is really not that hard to get AI to implement. These apps all look about the same for a reason. So maybe there will be a prevailing FOSS option that isn't trying to monetize.

[–] gschier 4 days ago

Yaak creator here! The commercial-use license is my best attempt at aligning incentives between me and the user, while still funding the project's future.

FYI the license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run from source for any use (including commercial), for free.

Happy to answer any questions as well.

[–] Waterluvian 4 days ago

Hey! I respect your desire to monetize. And I appreciate that you're trying to make it work through monetizing the commercial side. I think that's a sensible approach.

I'm for the most part just jaded about it all because I've seen Postman and Insomnia slowly boil the frog with increased pushiness towards logins and monetization. If a project is trying to make money at all, I feel it will inevitably grapple with the same issues. Especially for the kind of product where we can have five different options for in the comments section already. But I hope you do succeed in maintaining an honourable revenue stream.

[–] runako 4 days ago

> If a project is trying to make money at all

long-time engineer here, begging others to reconsider this attitude. Engineering work has value, engineers deserve to be paid for their time, and the community will have better software if engineers are able to get paid for their time.

Is there another profession where charging a fair price for a product is looked on with derision the way it is with software?

[–] Waterluvian 4 days ago

Oh don't get me wrong. I have gotten my company to pay for a lot of good FOSS and services, especially from teams of 1. There just has to be honest value-add potential.

[–] gschier 4 days ago

Yep! Fun fact, I made Insomnia too, and started over with Yaak after I sold it and watched it go down the same path. Yaak was my attempt at making sure it doesn't happen again.

[–] pamcake 4 days ago

Why not do your own (yes) diligence instead of relying on hearsay? It doesn't take a lot of digging to see it in this case.

[–] georgel 5 days ago

Just installed it, it's funny their landing page is littered with every AI buzzword too. But I am going to give Insomnia a try, I've heard people talk about it and a few others on HN over the years. I just need a glorified cURL GUI at the end of the day.

[–] debo_ 5 days ago

I use Bruno. I forget what Insomnia did that irritated me, but Bruno is the closest I've found to a dumb client that doesn't pester me for an account.

[–] reddalo 4 days ago

> I forget what Insomnia did

I remember, because I'm still irritated about that. They hid your collections and forced you to create a cloud account to keep using the app.

See here: https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577

[–] silverjaw 4 days ago

Give Sannr a try. It's an open source API client built for coding agents.

It's built by a former Postmanaut, me!

[–] jmuguy 5 days ago

Yeah it got bought by Kong a while back, and they're definitely not a great company, but the application itself still seems pretty OK.

I really like that you can paste a curl in to setup a new request.

This is definitely the type of app that some AI agent could cobble together pretty quickly, so I don't know why Postman etc thinks they have enough of a moat to keep enshittifying their product.