Postman which I thought worked locally on my computer, is down
87 comments
·October 20, 2025gschier
This is exactly why I made Yaak [1]. It's fully offline, no telemetry, open source, and can even sync with Git.
rmnclmnt
Curious to know more about the commercial licensing scheme for Yaak: if i’ve read correctly, purchasing a pro license if based on « good faith » as the features are exactly the same as the MIT licensed Hobby version?
Sincere question, been studying lots of OSS commercial licensing and always wonder what works in which context
gschier
This is a conscious bet I'm making.
Yes, it's a good-faith license. The license doesn't even apply to the OSS version (only prebuilt binaries).
The bet is that super fans will pay for it in the early days and, as it gets adopted by larger companies, they will pay in order to comply with the legalities of commercial use. So far, it's working! The largest company so far is 34 seats, with a couple more in the pipe!
throwing_away
Having often thought this is how I would attempt to monetize if I built a developer tool, I'm glad to hear that it's working.
It makes good sense because companies actually have an absurd amount of liability to you if they violate your agreement.
edoceo
Excellent work! Looking forward your post about some milestone ARR boundary, the gory details of how you got there.
maccard
If I asked my security team could I use yaak, they would (probably) say yes, and legal would say under no circumstances am I to use a personal license, they will pay for a commercial license. Large companies are incredibly risk averse when it comes to stuff like this.
EspadaV9
Been using Yaak for 6-9 months now, initially built from source, but now a paying subscriber. Recently saw that you post open metrics[1] on subscriber count and revenue, and love getting a little look behind the curtains.
gschier
Nice! Yep, trying to be as open and accessible as possible since so much of the industry is the opposite.
jmarchello
I fell in love with Insomnia pre-acquisition so I'm thrilled to see it has a spiritual successor. Good on you Greg.
gschier
I was so sad to see its decline after I left. Had to make it right.
alberth
Very cool.
Can you provide clarity on is a commercial license is needed. The license appears to be MIT but the yaak.app website gives the impression a license is required, even stating as such in FAQ.
gschier
The commercial license terms only apply to the prebuilt binaries. You can build and run the OSS version for whatever purpose you'd like. Check the last FAQ on the pricing page
725686
So you sold insomnia, sold it, and then created another competing tool? There where no restrictions in the deal?
gschier
Non-competes expire
dayson
I was looking at Yaak, and wondering if you've plans to bring it inside VS Code some day?
how would someone use this in a project that operates within VS Code Remote where the source sits on a remote server and isn't physically on the file system.
gschier
No plans for VSCode integration, no. It's only great because it's designed for a very specific use case and environment.
I'm not quite sure why Yaak wouldn't work in this case. It it because your running server wouldn't be accessible to Yaak, running on your system?
exasperaited
In case you aren’t familiar (and with apologies for my verbosity if you are): VSCode Remote can be best understood as a sort of hybrid of a local text editor and a remote web-based or X11 view of an editor for a remote session.
When you use a remote, the code is on the remote and all your editing functions (search, version control, terminal, extensions) happen in the remote via a worker process.
So in a remote session, everything is “local” to the remote. You may have no file “mount” of the thing at all on your host desktop machine. If you do a git commit, it’s running inside/on the remote. If you do a file search the files are searched on the remote, rather than downloading them over some network filesystem and searching locally.
The GP’s point is, I think: if you implemented Yaak as a VSCode extension, it could be made to function either in a local session or inside a remote (on a server accessed via SSH, a docker container, on the linux side of WSL etc.) and therefore have fast rather than slow access to the code, git repo etc.
I do essentially all my dev work (apart from compiling the odd mac app) inside remotes of various kinds to create reproducible environments, avoid cluttering the host, sandbox the tools, give me freedom to work from more than one machine etc., and I run into this sort of thing quite a bit.
There are at least two clients like this for VSCode —- Thunder Client and EchoAPI, and I believe both function in a remote session.
P.S. I loved Insomnia before the bad happened; it really helped with learning APIs. Thanks.
dcdc123
You should consider updating your free license to allow some time period of professional use, otherwise it's not possible to evaluate it at work without violating the license.
netsharc
It's possible if you build from source, even in the commercial environment. As the last item in the pricing page says, the license only applies to the prebuilt binaries.
gschier
You get a 30-day trial
ibejoeb
off topic, sorry: Looking at the docs and I don't find a quick answer. I really want an API client that will do OAuth and handle token refresh, and I haven't found one. The use case is that (obviously) I control the redirect URI, so I'd like to map it back to client (some kind of proxy that I run and make external with all of the requisite DNS and TLS) or maybe via a hosted service (which I'm willing to accept for the convenience.)
I haven't used postman or insomnia in a while since they went to the cloud, so I could just be missing it, but that's also a non-starter for me.
gschier
Yaak does this out of the box. It pops open a browser window and intercepts any redirect. And auto refresh is built in as well.
ibejoeb
Awesome. Downloaded. Thanks!
frizlab
RapidAPI (ex. Paw) does that AFAIK.
Also, it’s an amazing app.
mrbombastic
Still mad about the boring rebrand from Paw but it is still a nice app
puppycodes
Yeah they really turned their product into over-complicated garbage instead of focusing on doing one thing well.
fuzztester
That is true of many software companies these days.
xp84
RubyMine, and I assume its cousin JetBrains IDEs, has a great HTTP client (Tools -> HTTP Client) that I've used when I need this sort of functionality. I've been off of Postman for quite some time, since it got so complicated, and all I wanted was something to help me make simple web requests. (No disrespect intended to those who like Postman, it's just too overwhelming for my needs.)
selcuka
> RubyMine, and I assume its cousin JetBrains IDEs, has a great HTTP client
It's great. You can even paste a curl command into it and it will automatically convert and format it. You can then use the Copy button to convert your changes back to curl.
InfamousRece
Apparently Postman needs to be online in order to send “telemetry”: https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...
bigiain
"needs"...
jug
This could have been a 10 Megabyte TUI app in your terminal tab. Boggles my mind how even this kind of app manages to bring in Electron and the cloud.
Edit: Ah, so here it is: https://posting.sh
dayson
Wow, I've been looking for a postman/Bruno/foo replacement that I could use inside a remote ssh server or remote dev containers in vs code. This might be it!
paradox460
For a long time I used Paw, which became RapidAPI a couple years ago. Nice little app that does it's job well.
Lately I've just been using a Phoenix LiveBook notebook, with the Req package loaded into it. I can make requests, do arbitrary transforms on the data, and generally stay right at home in a language I like and understand
If you don't know elixir, I'm sure jupyter or some other notebook system would do just as nice of a job
duxup
I think for the most part everyone has accepted that Postman grew into a monster that bloated with features and presumably that comes with online dependence.
will4274
$dayjob sent an email to everyone with postman installed and asked us to uninstall when postman switched to online. $dayjob IT still maintains a wiki page and includes it on the banned software list. Used to be ubiquitous over there.
Pet_Ant
If you give a man a fish he eats for a day, but if you teach a man to fish you give up your monopoly on fisheries.
It used to considered vile that drug dealers tried to hook their users and force dependence... turns out that they were just ahead of the curve.
ozim
Postman is little potatoes - take a look what was done with free YouTube. Bait and switch all the same only stretched in time.
johnea
That's funny 8-)
It brought to mind this quote:
“It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,”
From a recent article that came through the feed:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-li...
AtlasBarfed
It's the founding economic principle of the British empire
ozim
Everyone accepted because it slowly became standard tool. I have business guys using postman and sharing collections is kind of must.
I hate it, for myself I don’t use it but when having to share API stuff I have to use it because that’s what other people understand.
Good for postman business, bad for everyone.
jamiepond
I made a very simple lightweight yaml based Postman alternative called `yapi`.
https://github.com/jamierpond/yapi
Run this:
yapi -c ./users.yapi.yaml
# users.yapi.yaml
# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://pond.audio/yapi/schema
url: http://localhost:3000
method: GET
path: /api/users
query:
select[name]: true
select[tag]: true
limit: 10
AdieuToLogic
This is one of many reasons why I prefer curl[0] and a bit of shell scripting. With this approach there is no dependency on a vendor's servers.
hk1337
If you're on macOS, try Paw/RapidAPI https://paw.cloud They may be affected by AWS.
I remember when one of the "Core Goals" of Postman was "Complete control over your data - Keep simple JSON based data formats which can be exported and shared as per user needs".
https://web.archive.org/web/20140604204111/http://www.getpos...