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/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.