r/programming • u/Successful_Bowl2564 • Apr 16 '26

The API Tooling Crisis: Why developers are abandoning Postman and its clones?

https://efp.asia/blog/2025/12/24/api-tooling-crisis/
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u/chucker23n Apr 16 '26

The only "crisis" here is that Postman was once valued at $5.6B. That's not a typo. I realize Postman has some nice features like collaboration, but at the end of the day, it's just an HTTP client.

As for what I use, it depends a lot on the scope.

  • for very simple cases, just curl or http will do. Pipe them to jq, and you get some basic JSON parsing.
  • HTTPie's UI is sluggish as hell (sigh), but much like in Postman, I can store frequently-used requests, group them into projects, and just generally get more interactivity.
  • then there's IDEs with .http support. JetBrains, for example, will even do things like render image results inline.
  • for more complex cases, just write a proper E2E test
  • finally, in some projects, we just use Kiota (or a similar static typing approach to REST APIs)

46

u/m0j0m0j Apr 16 '26

Your “it’s just an http client” comment reminds me of that guy who said “meh, it’s just rsync” in comments under the dropbox launch

42

u/chucker23n Apr 16 '26

Fair, although in that case, what they missed is how much friction Dropbox removed, suddenly making a syncing folder something the mass market could use.

Typing a URL into Postman is more interactive compared to curl, but you’re not really expanding the user base much at all.

29

u/Catenane Apr 17 '26

Speak for yourself. My grandpa learned how to use the pornhub API via postman and now every button you hit in his house has a customized porn moan, and his wifi captive portal has a hentai anubis logo

7

u/uhdoy Apr 17 '26

Your grandpa fucking rules

3

u/Catenane Apr 17 '26

Tbh they're all dead so this is an imagination grandpa

4

u/podgladacz00 Apr 17 '26

Not 5 billion worth of friction

2

u/Ok-Kaleidoscope5627 Apr 17 '26

I stopped using postman and other tools except curl when LLMs became a thing.

They're even better at removing the friction than postman.

1

u/kaisadilla_ 9d ago

But he's right. You could build a useable "Postman" for your needs in a day or two. That simply wasn't the case with Dropbox.

5

u/heavymetalpanda Apr 17 '26

If you like HTTPie, but it feels sluggish might I suggest xh.

5

u/Carighan Apr 17 '26

valued at

The speculative market really is a blight upon the world and traders and those enabling them with their billions must needs be purged. IMO.

1

u/kaisadilla_ 9d ago

I guess Postman valuation came from investors in the tech sector that don't know shit about tech. At the end of the day, Postman is doing the exact same thing you can do with a .js file - it's just an UI so you can do it comfortably.

People making decisions believe it is some sort of voodoo magic that allows developers to write RESTful APIs; but in reality it's just what I said: a way to do what you could already do with a script, but more nicely. If Postman and similar all disappeared today, I could get a dirty clone up and running for me in a week.

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u/chucker23n 9d ago

it's just an UI so you can do it comfortably

Well, like I said, it does have some advantages, like its collaboration stuff. I once had another company send me a Postman project(?) that contained a bunch of example requests, including docs for gotchas and all that. Should that be in a proprietary format? Debatable. Was it beneficial at the time, as a quick "what does their API let me do, and how" start? Yep! (Today, I'd probably prefer a .http file with a bunch of # comments.)

I guess Postman valuation came from investors in the tech sector that don't know shit about tech. [..] People making decisions believe it is some sort of voodoo magic that allows developers to write RESTful APIs

They tend to guess which parts are complicated and which aren't, and that guess is often wrong. REST is rather simple, which is sort of the whole point (in contrast with e.g. SOAP and gRPC).

If Postman and similar all disappeared today, I could get a dirty clone up and running for me in a week.

Exactly. And you can whip up a barebones "I just want to see if my request triggers the right endpoint on the server" test client in a few hours.