Postman silently auto-installs AI plugins and attempts to share all API data

Posted by sidgarimella |an hour ago |97 comments

pants2 an hour ago[20 more]

It's a shame what happened to Postman. It started as an excellent little developer tool for testing APIs. Then for some reason they raised over $400M in funding and hired 1,500+ employees, for what should have been a tiny OSS/passion project like curl or little snitch. Instead they now have to justify their valuation by forcing logins, collecting data, monthly subscriptions, AI features, etc.

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

senfiaj 15 minutes ago

Who still uses Postman? In my experience it became insanely slow and bloated. Switched to Bruno. IMO, Postman is like uTorrent, everybody heard about it and many install because of inertia.

dham an hour ago[1 more]

We went to bruno years ago and has been good. Nice to be able to store the request definitions in git. But to be honest, don't really need any of these tools anymore.

georgel an hour ago[1 more]

Postman went from a great lightweight tool to a bloated up-selling mess.

bottombutton 5 minutes ago

Working in healthcare, and Postman got decertified by our Cyber team for this. We all switched to Bruno overnight. Their sales team is pinging us like gangbusters though.

CommonGuy 21 minutes ago

I have been building Kreya [1] for over 6 years now as a Postman alternative. It's offline-first and privacy focused with a storage format made for git.

In all our years, Kreya "just worked" for our users without any drama or unwanted changes, unlike most of our competitors...

[1] https://kreya.app

ediamondscience 44 minutes ago

I don't understand how postman became the tool that it is today. The best version of it was just a logger and a formatter on top of an http client. The proto import was nice for gRPC. Who thought that relatively simple tool needed accounts and MCPs and whatever else they've thrown into it?

toddmorey an hour ago[1 more]

Why do all these tools require a paid account? Bruno specifically says it’s platform-free and stores everything in git.

unkn0wn_root 28 minutes ago

If anyone is interested in a Postman alternative but likes TUIs and leans more toward using .http files, check out resterm[0].

btw - I'm the author.

[0]https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm

rurp 17 minutes ago

Lots of discussion about less terrible alternatives to postman. For those already using a Jetbrains IDE there's a builtin rest client that works well. I haven't used it for anything too complicated, but for routine stuff where you need to hit an endpoint and fiddle with the payload and headers it's great.

Waterluvian an hour ago[4 more]

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.

Havoc 5 minutes ago

If even half of that is true then they’re cooked

maxdo 8 minutes ago

This is their very bad attempt to survive , who need this in the age of agents ?

theseamusjames 21 minutes ago

If there's ever been a perfect app to vibecode your own replacement, it's postman. Claude can knock out a completely usable competitor in under an hour, I'm sure of it. A day of tweaking and you'll have everything you need.

21 minutes ago

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throw03172019 17 minutes ago

Postman was amazing 6-8 years ago. What a downfall it’s been.

IlikeMadison 9 minutes ago

Use impostman.el/verb.el/restclient.el in Emacs.

neya 20 minutes ago

Wow, the timing is perfect, I was going to post about this. I also found out last night that they actually proxy your requests without your permission. I have setup an exclusion within my firewall for certain request parameters, but it kept getting blocked despite all my settings a though it was going through their server. That really pissed me off since these requests actually contain sensitive data they did not have permission to intercept.

Postman also removed the ability to export individual requests and grouped them into "Share" which means now you have to get a subscription to get your data out, and most export options are gone completely, except for collections itself - which they ask you questions why before you can get your data out. Fuck Postman. I moved to Insomnia as of last night (open source).

clickety_clack 17 minutes ago

I haven’t used postman for years and I don’t know why anyone would. Are people really paying for it?

27 minutes ago

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Colegno an hour ago

I really don't see the point of Postman. It used to be light and efficient, now it's bloated and inefficient

rienbdj 19 minutes ago

Postman feels pointless when I have an agent plus curl.

vachina 6 minutes ago

Thanks, I still use Postman out of muscle memory. Will use Bruno or Insomnia (as recommended here)

stillpointlab 37 minutes ago

If there ever was a tool that could be vibe coded, a postman-like is the one.

arttaboi an hour ago

Never liked Postman since they started forcing everyone to signup. Sometimes I hate VCs who unnecessarily funds and ruins a perfectly fine product (of course founders are equally guilty).

ebtebt 5 minutes ago

Thank you for the reminder, I had not deleted Postman yet. Done :D

richwater an hour ago[4 more]

Postman went from a nice tool to an almost virus in just a few years. It's crazy that anyone still uses it.

I'm currently using Bruno (https://www.usebruno.com/)

languagehacker 43 minutes ago

I've always kind of thought that Postman was an enshittification story waiting to happen. I've always felt like they prey on people who just aren't comfortable with the command line, and so there isn't much more stooping lower for them than something like this.

moi2388 an hour ago

Thank god we moved to Bruno and sometimes just http files in vs code or jetbrains

plagiarist an hour ago

Unsurprising. I loved the tool but it was obviously time to drop it when they began pushing for logins.

orphereus an hour ago[4 more]

Does everything have to go to shit when money is involved?

EmX_3000 27 minutes ago

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Surac an hour ago[1 more]

who the hell needs that. skills are just md files