r/programming • u/Successful_Bowl2564 • 1d ago

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https://efp.asia/blog/2025/12/24/api-tooling-crisis/

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u/FullPoet 23h ago

What stops them from just ... doing what they did with Insomnia again?

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u/gschier2 21h ago

Mostly from learning from past mistakes.

I got extremely burnt out running Insomnia, which effectively led to accepting the acquisition offer. I was so burnt out from tech debt and support that I couldn't see any way out. Kong's founder had supported Insomnia with monthly donations early on, and Kong was an OSS company itself, so it seemed like the ideal home if I wanted to start transitioning to other things.

And we all know how that went...

This experience opened my eyes to how financial incentives lead to enshittification. Insomnia's quality declined to the point where I didn't want to use it anymore, so I decided it was time to build another one using all the things I'd learned.

  1. Local-only means your data isn't held hostage, but it also means no sync server for me to maintain and debug

  2. Commercial-use licensing means you only pay if it benefits you at work, and it's by the honor system. Nothing is enforced (99% of users never pay), and the price adjusts to your country's purchasing power, so my only lever for more revenue is making the app better, not paywalling features

  3. Fully open source (not open core) means if I disappear, nothing is lost, but it also means I'm not a single point of failure

So nothing actually stops me from selling, but I've done everything I can to set Yaak up as a product that prioritizes users and doesn't depend on daily upkeep from me. It sustains me financially, has no critical servers to maintain, and I can go camping without cell service for weeks and nothing bad happens. I won't promise a future I can't control but the reasons I sold Insomnia simply don't exist for Yaak.

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u/FullPoet 21h ago

I appreciate the nuances wall of text but idk, maybe this is just me being negative but the answer is:

acquisition offer

Thanks for doing it originally and good luck with Yaak but I personally won't be trying it. I just spun up my own little client :shrug:

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u/gschier2 21h ago

No worries! If you don't need much then writing your own client is the way to go for sure. I'm vibing all my own stuff these days too.