Postman is limiting local collection runner to 25 runs for basic plans

https://community.postman.com/t/250-collection-runs-per-month-on-professional/43946

by dvngnt_ • 3 years ago

51 57 3 years ago

community.postman.com

andrew_2• 3 years ago

Insomnia is by far my favorite Postman alternative https://insomnia.rest/

devmor4• 3 years ago

Absolutely love Insomnia for its GraphQL features. Made learning the spec a breeze.

paxys4• 3 years ago

So the alternative to a partially closed source freemium app is...another partially closed source freemium app?

andrew_2• 3 years ago

It's an alternative, and as stated is my favorite. If closed source bothers you, find another alternative. Or you could continue to reply insufferably. The choice is yours.

paulryanrogers• 3 years ago

Competition is good, even if ideological purity is better.

anaganisk• 3 years ago

I dont understand the sentiment behind these kinds of comments. They listed an alternative. Since when did alternatives mean open source only? I dont see it mentioned in HN guidelines either. And why is closed source considered to be bad by default? I have no idea. There are wonderful closed source apps out there that are reliable and have been well maintained and never had any issues and nefarious open-source apps that did bait and switch, pulled off out of spite, shut down because of lack of funds and many more reasons. We dont have to be snarky every time someone tries to suggest or do something. We could do better by listing may be a favorable alternative. We are insulting both the developer and the commenter by being snarky.

maxloh• 3 years ago

Isn't it open source?

avinassh2• 3 years ago

look into hoppscotch. Its MIT licensed - https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/blob/main/LICENSE

pritambaral• 3 years ago

What do you mean partially closed source? I thought Insomnia was fully open source[1] and I couldn't find any closed source elements after looking around.

1: https://github.com/Kong/insomnia

nickstinemates5• 3 years ago

Kong develops a lot of really nice tools.

devmor4• 3 years ago

Good things never last. I suppose it's time to start beefing up those collection exporters to the multiple freeware tools that do the exact same thing as postman.

paxys4• 3 years ago

Popular app takes VC money and starts charging users for previously-free features once the pressure is on to earn returns. Users – who have been freeloading for years – can easily move to something else (or write their own version), but would rather just moan about it online.

This same scenario has played out 10000x with the exact same outcome, yet people keep expecting something different from the next one.

Wtf even is a "local collection runner"?

devmor4• 3 years ago

Its just a script that runs a collection of requests in a row, from your machine.

Something every single request tool can do. A very basic feature that requires absolutely no resources from Postman's servers.

paxys4• 3 years ago

So then just..write the same script yourself?

nickstinemates5• 3 years ago

Wtf even is a "local collection runner"?

https://learning.postman.com/docs/running-collections/intro-...

Basically a way to integrate your API requests into a headless experience, can be used for things like CI.

atomicnumber3• 3 years ago

What is the right way to fund these kinds of tools?

Right now, it seems like it only happens a few ways:

- be a giant saas and use your "free for personal use" tier as a loss-lead/way to get devs using you, thus wanting to use you at work, then you charge their work. e.g. github.

- be linux and be a big enough critical piece to where companies actually fund you directly

- pay software engineers oodles of money so that they can have leisure time to maintain the plethora of random FOSS software that's out there

- leech off the social safety nets of other countries and let engineers subsisting off ramen in the netherlands write your foss software

- play the donation-to-COL arbitrage game and write FOSS from a third-world country where a meager stream of USD donations/purchases can sustain you reliably

Pretty much every single one of these except the linux one is pretty awful. And we can't all be Linux. The second least problematic is probably the one where you pay engineers shittons of money and then let them do shit as side projects, but it seems really indirect.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

be a giant saas and use your "free for personal use" tier as a loss-lead/way to get devs using you, thus wanting to use you at work, then you charge their work. e.g. github.

Is not a bad option. Devs won’t pay for tools, but their orgs will. Isn’t that how it should be? My plumber’s employer pays for their Rigid $2k hydraulic copper fitting crimper, for example, because it saves time vs sweating pipes (enabling them to do more jobs, and generate more revenue).

Be the hydraulic crimper of dev tools. Expensive, but generating so much value no one batts an eye at paying for it (obligatory patio11 “you’re not charging enough” reference here). Some people will cheap out and pay $100 for the hand crimper and do their crimping by hand; don’t sell to them, they are not evaluating their time value efficiently (or they simply don’t need your tool).

For a recent example of this: Docker, going from $12M to $100M ARR within a year as soon as they started charging enterprise users.

wzy• 3 years ago

It was OK while it lasted.

coffeebeqn• 3 years ago

Incredible this company had a $5.6 billion valuation in 2021

notatoad• 3 years ago

i figured you must be joking, or mistaken and thinking of a different company called postman.

but apparenty it's real. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/18/api-platform-postman-value...

gregors2• 3 years ago

That's truly impressive. I'm having trouble comprehending that number for this product. Amazing. Hats off to the biz team.

MonkeyMalarky• 3 years ago

I've never understood the appeal of postman. What's wrong with a python script + requests?

phphphphp• 3 years ago

You’re about to get Dropbox’d: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

calvinmorrison• 3 years ago

Well and that's it right? They get developers on board early, and techies, etc... then shift to mass market and remove features and add anti-features.

Github, slack, whatever else. it's a big long cycle. Now I see tools like Postman and the first thing I think is "how do they want my money, whats their strategy financially", things I never thought when I bought a CD-ROM or a one-time license to tools.

acdha• 3 years ago

That’s not a great comparison: the two tools have very different users, and if you’ve ever used Postman for anything non-trivial you’ve probably hit things which are but should not be substantial points of friction (secrets, OAuth renewal, diagnostic output, etc.) whereas Dropbox really did a great job of doing exactly what you wanted with a minimum of fuss.

nickstinemates5• 3 years ago

postman gives you a lot "for free" in terms of development and you can ship your project around to other, less technical people, or to prospects as a sales tool. lower barrier to entry.

this is a dumb change, especially given you're not using any of their resources so artificial constraints on the number of runs makes zero sense.

brookst2• 3 years ago

It doesn’t cost them anything to develop, test, maintain, and support?

floatrock• 3 years ago

Ease and iteration speed for complicated APIs. Why make notebooks when you can just make a single python script?

Well, same way that notebooks are a REPL that remembers things, it's helpful to rapidly tweak parameters in your API calls, flick a menu to point to a different environment, retry requests on your own local instance, etc. Then when you have it all ready, you just save and it's shared with your team, and the non-developers don't even need to learn what a virtualenv is. Even your CI can take advantage of it. Well, it could.

There's "nothing" Postman provides that you can't do with a python script and git, but it lets you move much faster and have a tighter iteration loop.

That said, paying $10/user/mo just to effectively share a bunch of json definitions was always a plan that only made sense with corporate credit cards. With this added artificial restriction, my team is going to be looking for other alternatives.

Dropbox gave a similar degree of convenience and that's why they took off. But once every cloud provider figured out they too can sync files in the cloud, the novelty became a commodity. This plan reeks of Postman being out of actual feature ideas so in their desperation they're just milking whatever they can get out of their corporates through artificial restrictions before "a cloud-sync'd API runner" becomes a software commodity and the lights go out.

helloanoop3• 3 years ago

Yes, we need more tools that work on top of plain text files. And use git for version control.

Currently working on a project to solve this https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

czx4f4bd• 3 years ago

I haven't touched Postman since they started pushing me to log in, but for me it was just an alternative to hitting GET endpoints with my web browser or piping curl to jq. If I'm looking through an API's docs and figuring out how it works, I often want to quickly test endpoints and see what they return. I could've written a script to do it, but Postman made that slightly easier by removing the need to write code or remember syntax.

phaedryx• 3 years ago

I use VS Code and I've found Thunder Client to be handy: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rangav.v...

geophph• 3 years ago

+1 for thunder client. Simple and clean, works well for what I need to do and nothing more. A bit more approachable for someone newer to this space.

gazby• 3 years ago

ThunderClient is also proprietary for anyone who stumbles across this.

berjin• 3 years ago

I switched to REST-Client for VS Code many years ago when Postman wanted me to sign in. I knew that was the beginning of the end for Postman.

It uses these amazing things called files. With files you can commit them to a repository of other files where your team can find them.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...

avinassh2• 3 years ago

I was curious about how they are storing the requests in a file and if they follow some spec. I discovered RFC 2616 [0]. From the page's description:

you can follow the standard RFC 2616 that including request method, headers, and body.

    POST https://example.com/comments HTTP/1.1
    content-type: application/json

    {
        "name": "sample",
        "time": "Wed, 21 Oct 2015 18:27:50 GMT"
    }

[0] - https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec5.html

aPoCoMiLogin2• 3 years ago

or http client for jetbrain products: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...

helloanoop3• 3 years ago

Yes, we need more tools that are cit friendly. If you are looking for a good GUI based client that works on top of plain text files, do checkout Bruno.

https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

scroot• 3 years ago

For you Emacs heads, restclient-mode is pretty good

https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

trengrj• 3 years ago

Does it work well with org-babel?

rgoulter• 3 years ago

The readme mentions someone wrote an ob-restclient.el https://github.com/alf/ob-restclient.el

sidmitra• 3 years ago

I've been following this for a while https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/

Although 2 features that would make this perfect are still open

- Private self-hosting: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/issues/870

- sync collections with git: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/issues/870

gregors2• 3 years ago

I ditched postman years ago, I really don't see the value in it anymore.

pigbearpig• 3 years ago

I wonder how much they're paying for Discourse to run their forum

amanzi• 3 years ago

I just used Postman yesterday for the first time in ages and loved how it had all my previous work saved in the cloud and restored it after logging in. Also, the pre-request script feature was great for calculating a signature of the request which had to be included in the request. Do other API clients have the scripting features of Postman?

rangav• 3 years ago

Thunder Client is an extension for VS Code, has scripting and more features.

You can also save requests data to git repo.

https://www.thunderclient.com/

jicea• 3 years ago

Shameless plug: why not switch to Hurl [1], an open source cli tool to run and test HTTP requests in plain text, with libcurl under the hood? (I'm one of the maintainer)

[1] https://hurl.dev

chucky123• 3 years ago

hoppscotch is a good alternative. Even insomnia is going down the drain.

soraminazuki• 3 years ago

What bothers me about Postman is how they took ownership of the popular httpbin project 5 years ago and left it to bitrot. They haven't made a single commit since then, not even dependency upgrades. Now it has acquired 5 years' worth of CVEs in its dependency chain. They receive PRs to fix those issues, but all PRs and issues are ignored.

Why take ownership of the project if when there's no intention of maintaining it from the very beginning? It's almost as if projects like httpbin are detrimental to their business.

https://github.com/postmanlabs/httpbin

aPoCoMiLogin2• 3 years ago

if you have macos I highly recommend rapidAPI https://paw.cloud postman is just to heavy for simple requests..

helloanoop3• 3 years ago

If you are looking for an alternate, please checkout the new and innovative api client Bruno

https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

It's free, open-source and fresh with some radical ideas challenging the current status quo.

Oh, BTW we support infinite collection runs.. lol..

Postman is limiting local collection runner to 25 runs for basic plans

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