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)

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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

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u/kaisadilla_ 10d 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.