I stopped using Postman when it magically started connecting to a central server for… nothing useful, really. I have no idea why people would design software this way, especially a development tool that should work with any web server, under any network condition (including fully offline against localhost).
Now I just have a Makefile with a bunch of curl invocations, or Python tests with requests to match against expected responses.
We went with a mix of curl, Invoke-WebRequest, favourite scripting language, HTTP files, IDE tooling, Insomina, after Postman went cloud online and became a forbidden tool on our systems.
Also I am not counting that Insomina won't follow the same footsteps as Postman.
I wrote my own api invoker, https://placeholders.cc/api-invoker/, mainly because postman is slow, eats a ton of memory and it becomes more and more restrictive to non logged in users. In don't mind having an electron based application like open. but i hate to have 10 like it open in the same time.
+ 1. I just came across it a few months ago after getting fed up with Postman's unintuitive ever-changing UI, etc. So far so good. Easy to store bruno files in a repo to have a nice easy place to go to get test calls
tried it but had some buggy interface when i used it full-time earlier this year. (albeit i work in a slow vm)
it might have changed now but it did not support grpc endpoints, which was a dealbreaker for me. but definitely appreciate the project and i hope it reaches core feature parity soon.
People that want to make money on their software obviously.
Connecting to a license server is pretty much standard.
For Postman it is annoying because it was never explicitly stated and it seemed like they are cool kids making nice helpful app. But really they are in for money. Which is not bad have to say but the way they did it is bad.
I think they started as cool kids and they changed their mind on the way. I'm using postman for a long time. I liked it, i preferred the online version, slowly slowly they started to push users towards the app, making it harder and harder first to use it without and account, then to use the online version. This is how I ended up with a heavy desktop app, when i needed something simple and easy to use.
I get the whining, but teams need ways to share their complex workflows, and teams are where the money is for all dev focused software.
That's who pays for all your tools to have free versions.
People who use make and curl to jury rig some unshareable solution together that no-one else in their company would even bother trying to use aren't worth any money to companies.
Teams that are knowledgeable jury rig their own custom solutions without all the enterprise cruft. They make solutions that fix their problem and they do it faster than the teams who use bloated enterprise solutions.
I am tired of seeing over engineered enterprise solutions that that are implemented and never used because they can’t be integrated into the dev workflow easily. Simple bash script that does the task it was designed to do beats any enterprise crap.
The wisdom of pipes! I'd share these workflows the exact same way we share others [ie: BASH, Ansible]: Git. Needs nothing more than a directory, though an SSH daemon is quite nice.
Those of us who can survive without desperate monetization plays are worth quite a lot, actually. They say 'jury rig', we say 'engineer'.
Well written bash will run anywhere. Amateur bash will only run on the version of Mac OS it was written on, and even then only after the correct collection of random homebrew packages installed has been installed.
>I get the whining, but teams need ways to share their complex workflows, and teams are where the money is for all dev focused software.
Complacent corporate teams. Agile teams need to simplify their workflows, and know that a Makefile can be better than some closed down, Cloud-first tool.
>That's who pays for all your tools to have free versions
Nah, we have free versions for stuff without enterprise editions too.
>People who use make and curl to jury rig some unshareable solution together that no-one else in their company would even bother trying
> (...) teams need ways to share their complex workflows (...)
Apps like Postman are the wrong tool for this purpose.
If you want to share workflows, let alone complex workflows, any automated test suite is far better suited for this purpose.
We are in the age of LLMs and coding agents, which make BDD-style test frameworks even more relevant, as they allow developers to implement the workflows, verify they work, and leave behind an enforceable and verifiable human-readable description of those workflows.
A little bit of feedback, I could barely read any of the text in the interface as the contrast is almost zero and the font is unbelievably small. So I tried Cmd+ to zoom the interface, but nothing happened, so I tried Cmd, to open the settings to see if there was a zoom level or contrast setting, nothing happened. I like the idea of it, but it's totally unusable.
Voiden looks really promising, so I installed it to get started, and here's my hot takes so far before even using it.
* The text is tiny for my old eyes. I figured there's probably a setting for it and hit Cmd-, and found there's no settings UI whatsoever. No keyboard shortcut either it seems, and no help menu either, so no searching for "keyboard" with Shift-Cmd-/
* .void files may be markdown, but no markdown editor will recognize it as such. Maybe support .void.md as well. I also couldn't find any way to edit the markdown source of a .void file from voiden, which is a bit ironic for a tool that loudly advertises the markdown format as a central feature.
* Could there be a block that expands into the full URL of the request and parameters above it (or perhaps as args)? How about another that renders as a cURL command, which would cover POST/PUT/PATCH requests nicely too. My API documentation always has cURL request examples and I detest writing them by hand.
* While I'm suggesting blocks, one that renders the response headers/body to the preceding request would also be handy. It should support a placeholder response that gets replaced when the request is actually run (and perhaps a "save" button to persist it in the markdown). Responses get long, so maybe have a max-height for the block and make it scrollable
I'm actually really excited about Voiden and hope these can be addressed. It has a similar feel to Jetbrains' .http format, but an evolutionary leap beyond it. It also feels really raw and unfinished.
Hi, thx for the feedback!
Testing the settings (including different themes and font sizes as we speak).
Some tweaks are been made on the responses side as well.
As per the rest of your comments, some of these things have been discussed or touched upon, others have been just added to the discussion board :)
To be fair, Vim and Curl are almost certainly dynamically linked, so they get to "cheat" a little. 10 megs is entirely reasonable for a statically linked utility intended to "just work" when you dump it somewhere in your $PATH.
Take the Micro editor. It's written in Go, and packs a fair bit of functionality into a single 12 meg static binary (of which a few megs is probably the runtime.)
I believe the Ken Olson quote was that nobody needed a computer in their house, but that was a time where businesses were using terminal servers... it would have been interesting to see where that would have went, but we might be heading that way again since we own nothing and everything is a only a temporary license.
The second quote was "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers", and it's attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM saying it in 1943. The real quote is indeed from Watson, but in 1953, summarizing the sales projections of a specific model of machine, and noting that they actually sold 18 of them.
Gates denies ever saying anything like the 640K quote, but it was possibly someone at Microsoft being salty about the 640K limit that IBM had imposed on the PC through its design.
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!
Oooh this is neat! I've been using hurl (https://hurl.dev/) for the last few years and while it's fun, I've ended up with a ton of text files floating around a folder instead of any kind of organization. Might have to try this.
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.)
> 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.
A lot of organizations have very large suites of postman collections that serve as API documentation, regression and QA testing… they often heavily rely on the postman Javascript libraries and have custom code embedded directly in the collection.
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.
$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.
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.
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
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!
You can be an Oracle and audit your customers and develop that adversarial relationship. The idea is that that sort of thing makes you rot in the long run.
Pretty poorly actually, people avoid Oracle products like the plague. Nobody is buying a JVM from Oracle or buying their DB - they're using open source solutions that are both free and provide more features.
They have a lot of inerita, but that's it. If you're in Greenfield development, there is a close to 0% chance you will choose Oracle as your RDBMS.
Hey, personally I agree. Why would I ever go with Oracle.
But that's A) me personally and B) me in Cloud/Startup type companies, so of course we don't got with Oracle.
But like you mentioned, inertia. So my previous gigs that were large multi-national of course were all Oracle. And they were all huge and had zero reason to not just buy the Oracle tax. Which is why Oracle is going strong.
Despite all the rage, Oracle can still survive quite some time on running boring things like I don't know, many large banks and other boring old businesses. Which of those is really gonna go "AWS Aurora MySQL" when the have had an in-house "Oracle Exadata" run their entire business operation "just fine" for longer than those Cloud providers have even be around?
I am sure everyone making shareware in the early 1990's would have loved to spy on people to know how many used their software for free (and have a way to spam those users to try to sell more licenses), but they couldn't and just did without that.
Thank you for your honest and detailed answer! Great to see it’s working so far and this allows you to build a true OSS product in the meantime, i really appreciate that (i think this is the biggest benefit of your licensing scheme)
Under pricing for the hobby tier you could add as free or pay what you want. $50/yr isn't crazy but might get a few smaller donations if that was an avenue.
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.
I love a solo dev building from scratch is going up against an entire team and company who have years of head start, alot more money and a product that the solo dev originally wrote for them.
And the solo dev has a better product already and might actually win haha.
Hey @gschier this is awesome. I've been a long time user of Insomnia and since the acquisition it's ever so slowly, well... it's been a challenge for me.
I didn't know you created Yaak!
I just downloaded Yaak and it's been awesome, thank you!
I downloaded this through AUR on Arch and one bit of feedback is that I wish you'd make the sig verification a whole bunch easier, thanks!
This looks great. If you can wait 8 years before you sell out, that should be long enough for me to retire. Give me a headsup if they offer you a billion earlier so I can start looking for Yaak's replacement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wrote this late at night and didn’t explain what I meant by X11 view.
I was thinking back to running X sessions on remote machines, sending for example a text editor view back across the network to my desktop.
VSCode remote feels to my fiftysomething brain to be logically quite like that, only you are sending the display back from the remote worker using web techniques, and rather than to a display manager, you are sending it back into the shell of an editor, so it appears to be largely indistinguishable from a session running on your local machine.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I think what you want already exists as VSCodes remote SSH tunnel port forwarding (not the one that makes it publicly accessible).
Startup a dev server on the remote machine and forward the port to localhost. It should now be accessible via http://localhost:[port] on your local machine in the browser or any application, as if it’s running locally.
I find it’s very useful for also for interacting with DBs/Redis. Just forward the port your DB communicates on and use whatever client on your local machine to interact with it.
As far as I know this works with any service that communicates via TCP
Yeah, it would help with using the tool to access a private-to-the-remote API.
Won't immediately help with giving that tool access to the file system or Git.
For a local VM, you can have file system mounts, fast enough for Git.
SSHFS could help in some genuinely distant remotes with access to the file system (though SSHFS in the context of multiple file writers is fraught with risk of file corruption; been there, bought that T-shirt).
With properly network-remote VMs, nothing helps that much with giving the tool access to performing Git operations on changes inside your remote: Git is slow over network file systems even when they are quite local.
This is the real power of the VS Code remote after all; everything happens there.
The REST Book extension was made by a VS Code dev and does a decent enough chunk of what is needed, at least for simple use cases.
Handy Dandy Notebook as well, but that requires some reformulation to get everything in terms of standard curl/node/python/etc commands. (whether that’s better or worse than a custom http dsl is a matter of some debate)
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.
Hey Greg! Can you clarify that building from source and using in a commerical environment is permissable under the MIT license? I have built from source and yet the program is under "trial mode" currently and looks to have a 30 day ticker of doom. Is this a bug? Is there a flag missing? I cannot find any detailed instructions on setting flags or environment variables to turn this off.
That'll do it. That config is used for the production build of Yaak that's downloadable from the website. Just running "tauri build" or "npm run app-build" is what you want.
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.
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
Quick request, if it's doable: would you mind making a portable version of this? We're super locked down on our machines (even as developers), and all programs that need to be installed need to be approved. Portable programs fly under the radar, so they're easier to try discreetly, then we can make an official request to get them approved or buy a license.
Edit: oh my, you also made Insomnia, that I used when Postman was on the enshittification path...
This looks awesome! I've been wondering what to do with Insomnia since its enshittification.
One idea: since you are doing good-faith licenses anyway, maybe you could add in the possibility to pay for some kind of one-time license? I don't particularly need or want updates from my API tool, I just want it to work and not break. I would be fine with paying a one time commercial license that gives non expiring right to use a particular version.
One thing I despise about postman is how much friction there is to creating a new request. In my line of work, I'm often using an API client as a scratch pad to validate /poc. At the same time, it would be nice to just have a simple "history" that I could go back and search if I needed to find some request I made a few weeks ago.
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
Question: Do I miss something by not using Postman? My alternatives for development are "Edit and Resend" of a request (in Firefox) and plain old curl scripts for reusable examples.
Not Postman specifically but a client like that will allow you to prepare a whole set of different requests and save them so you can build up a test suite, plus some of them do things like scripting, chaining requests together etc. It's like the difference between a text editor and an IDE, so it depends on your needs really.
I use a mix of tools, depending on needs: `curl` scripts for things I might need to automate on barebones OS installations (Linux/macOS), HTTPie on my local CLI env if I'm debugging something where I need to mutate parameters quickly: making sequential calls, many requests with varying parameters; and Insomnia as GUI where I can save requests with parameters, headers, etc. to be re-used during development.
Each one has its strengths, and weaknesses, Insomnia can export the saved requests as `curl` commands so it's a nice visualisation to iterate over a complex call until it's working, and then be exported if needed to be automated; `curl` is quite ubiquitous but clunky to remember the exact arguments I might need; HTTPie has a nice argument syntax so it's quite readable to be quickly edited but isn't present without installing Python, pip, and pulling it.
We use it a bit at our company. We have a collection file that includes a ton of requests with headers and body. Developers can with ease load that collection file and run it against their own server, and also quickly change to a different server with just a click.
I guess a substitution would be a git repo with curl scripts and environment variables?
We also have some non-tech people who use postman to run tests.
I used to use postman, before they become greedy, now I use Bruno.
But to your question - I have saved based authenticated request to our company useful APIs - github/jira/artifactory - so when I want to string together some micro tool to do something in batch, I don't have to remember where do I create API key, and how do they accept it.
We use it at my work because one team will create the backend, and another team will create the frontend, and its useful to be able to share a big list of all the endpoints, along with how to use them and the expected result that can all be run, as well as handling all the auth for you
At the end of the day with Postman you wind up trying to codify requests via collections, which tends to just be programming in a more limited language.
If you take a peek at the commit history [1], you'll see that the project started only last week with some very vague commit messages. The code is also quite messy and unoptimized. It's a cool project but not exactly industry-level software.
will be tidying/optimising as i use it more.
PRs are welcome! this is totally a tool i made just for me, to solve my problems. hopefully other people like it too.
If you're willing to use a CLI, you can try Hurl [1]. It's is an Open Source cli using libcurl to run and test HTTP requests with plain text.
We use libcurl for the reliability, quickness and top features (HTTP/3 IPv6 for instance) and there are features like:
- requests chaining,
- capturing and passing data from a response to another request,
There is nice syntax sugar for requesting REST/SOAP/GraphQL APIs but, at the core, it's just libcurl! You can export you files to curl commands for instance. (I'm one of the maintainers)
I don’t personally use Postman, but at work we use .http files, which are easy to version and manage with Git. The downside is that you’re almost entirely tied to VS Code and the REST Client extension. I’m not a big fan of VS Code myself (I use Vim), so if anyone interested, I created resterm [0] - a terminal client that works with .http or .rest files and adds some extra "nice-to-have" features. I’m currently working on adding OpenAPI spec importing.
I highly recommend checking out the postman forum for posts about the scratchpad being removed, it's a fascinating and frustrating read.
It would be so much faster and easier for the postman reps to just shut down the conversation. And yet, for some reason, they keep it going for very long while still being extremely evasive when it comes to any concern raised about data sovereignty.
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".
There seems to be a common theme here. Some project gets traction, it works very well. Then they got VC money and the project turn to crap for the community. Not all VC project, but seems to be common theme. I also aware that devs need funding to keep a project going for the long run. Are there any better alternatives for funding now days?
Not sure if this applies to Postman specifically, but I think a lot of software projects start out largely as hobby projects, and might not have even had an ambition of making serious money out of it, and as such there's no reason to be hostile to the community.
Then a VC fund gives these developers a dumptruck full of money and expect returns immediately afterward. Something like Postman likely doesn't make a ton of money unless they're doing something anti-consumer like selling data.
One of the things I've thought about for startups are things with the general theme of "complete control over your data", how could I write something like this into the articles of incorporation (or similar) to make some of those values at least somewhat irrevocable?
Why you and other devs say Insomnia is unmaintained?
There has been a release in september, issues has been solved within last month, and multiple pull requests has been managed (merged and rejected) also recently.
Maybe you refer to issues specific to a platform? Thanks in advance.
Devs have to eat and if someone offers you a life altering amount of money to work on their hobby project, a lot of them would probably take it. It's hard to turn down something that might assure your family a comfortable life.
That's all good, and I hope they're happy, but they shouldn't expect their audience to stick around if they start to ruin the project that got them there.
Sure, but why does it always have to lead to users getting the short end of the stick? Why can't they accept money and NOT screw over the users? And if the choice is between "Take VC money and screw users" and "Reject VC money and happy users", why do 99% of the people take the first option? They're most likely software developers (as this is the context), so it isn't really a choice between "uncomfortable life" or "comfortable life", there is something more going on here.
This is not what I said. I meant that users should contribute and not expect FOSS projects as a separate channel of getting material for their corporate work.
I want to judge the devs for it but if a VC walked up to me with a bag full of cash and the opportunity to work full time on a passion project I can’t be anywhere near sure I’d say no.
That bag full of cash will keep being a bag full of cash but the passion project will likely become driven by whoever hands you the bag and will head towards their goals, not yours. Anyway you'll keep the cash. It's not different from what the vast majority of us do with our jobs every day.
The plumber doesn't start to install additional pipes that require an annual fee, or spying on me "because you know, nothing to hide", or any other nonsense we are seeing in software.
Same but since a lot of bigger scenarios I need to test the scripting quickly becomes a lot so I often do this using Groovy (as I am a Java developer this is nearly the same). I now have a collection of scripts I often reuse and adapt.
I'm looking at alternatives that are guarantee to work locally and only found the following:
Posting.sh -> Postman imports are experimental which makes it a non-starter for people like myself with large Postman collections. TUI only also makes it harder to switch.
Insomnia -> Owned by another large tech company.
Yaak -> Made by the same guy who created AND SOLD Insomnia above. Not exactly comforting to switch over for. How long till this one also gets sold?
Any other great local tools out there? I would like to be done with Postman.
Restfox [1] is worth checking out. It's fully offline and lets you version control your collections with git or any sync tool you prefer. The postman import is well tested and the app also allows you to export back to Postman collections.
It isn't working locally for quite some time now, hence why many companies have forbidden using Postman, given the issue of testing internal APIs with security information hosted on Postman servers.
OK which dumb engineer unsafely wrapped the entire feature flagging / observability / telemetry tooling around the main process of the app such that it wouldn't load unless those libraries resolved?
The red flag appeared a few years ago already. My company forbade us to use it. This wan no problem for me, because I mostly use curl, but people got upset. We thought this too much restrictive, but ...
I'm using an old version of Postman with their servers blocked through the system hosts file. I keep meaning to migrate to whatever the next best thing is but this setup just works for me.
Don't you love how slimeballs cant help themselves though? Instead of just letting free and easy happen the one time a year they go down... they just spit in everyones face to remind them now they have time to go find an alternative
I ditched Postman for Insomnia (Open source) after Postman refused to adhere to customers to disable auto-updates for 6 years+. I checked on their GitHub issue tracker and it turns out, the solution was to upgrade to their "Enterprise plan".
I am against government regulation, but at times likes this (or your sous vide and washing machine requiring online accounts to function) the idea for regulations that mandate availability of local server for client server applications is alluring. And making all cloud functionality optional.
I'm stealing your thread to ask a question: How would you explain what an API Client is to someone who's never used one before, and has always just consumed/produced/tested API's the old-fashioned way?
Is it basically "an IDE for playing with API's"?
Is it only for HTTP-based API's?
Does it come with canned functionality for popular services out there?
Every single time I’ve installed anything with snap I’ve regretted it. It causes all sorts of annoying issues, including e.g. preventing integration between apps because of its supposed security model. This is typical of consumer operating systems, like Windows, but not what should be encouraged on Linux.
On top of that, Canonical is pushing snap very hard. Try to uninstall the Firefox snap - e.g. because it doesn’t integrate well with password managers - and install it using apt from the Mozilla repo. Ubuntu will later just silently replace it back with the snap version.
I’m about to switch away from Ubuntu as a result of this.
maybe it doesn't do everything postman does, but I'm very happy using the rest client extension in vs code, the http files with the api calls are commited to the source code repository along with the code is easy to use, does what i need, and is easy to share with my colleagues.
Despite the strength of marketing, "DIY" is sometimes more reliable than "pay fees to so-called "tech" company"" and subject oneself to possibility of telemetry, data collection, surveillance and targeted advertising. But every user is different
For recreational internet use, I use yy025 + TCP client + TLS proxy. No fees, no telemetry, no BS. I can select from a long list of TCP clients in this setup, e.g., original netcat, tcploop, tcpclient, socat, etc., as well as a variety of TLS proxies, e.g., tinyproxy+stunnel, haproxy, etc. I can modify the source of all the programs and can do more than is possible if using an "HTTP client", e.g., curl
Of course I am not testing "web apps" for a commercial enterprise. Nor do I use a so-called "modern", graphical browser. I retrieve data without a browser. Since I use HTTP every day in textmode it is "interesting"^1 to see software that somehow commercialises similar HTTP use, e.g., Postman, Burp, etc.
It will never disappear, enshittify, or let you down. It's already modern, and has a great UI. It's available everywhere. It supports every protocol and feature under the sun. Those fancy features you think you need: you don't. Whatever you're missing can be easily added via simple shell scripts or aliases.
In the beginning, there was Postman, and we used it, and it was good. Then, Postman became enshittified, so we switched to Insomnia. Then, Insomnia became enshittified, so we switched to Bruno. Then, Bruno became enshittified, so now it's Yaak.
Let's see how long it takes for one of these programs to break the cycle.
And each of those are just thin wrappers around curl I guess. We should be glad that some good free software could be produced in the past to serve as the foundation for today's greed.
And Dropbox is a thin wrapper around rsync. Tools like Postman are convenient. JS scripting allows to extend it easily, like to make request with random test data. Anyway, the previous company I worked for banned it, as soon as it switched from local files to cloud based "collections". Older versions would be ok, but like others mentioned, Postman doesn't like to hear "no" when trying to auto-update itself.
Postman founder here. I did not time this with an AWS outage of this magnitude but I posted about filesystem, git, and offline support coming to Postman last week: https://x.com/a85/status/1978979495836356819?s=46
Postman has a lot of capabilities now that require the cloud but there is still an offline client built in just for requests.
Building sign-in and cloud features were not due to a VC-led conspiracy. A large number of companies depend on APIs (like AWS) and have thousands of services and APIs. Customers need to manage them and wanted us to build it.
Postman allows for turning off history, keeping variables local, setting up a local vault all in the free product and in more advanced plans, there are secret scanning capabilities for IT and security teams.
These issues are not unique to Postman and apply to all cloud products like GitHub as an instance. Products that are “offline” just shift the burden to the user.
All good security measures, for sure, but the blog post you linked doesn’t mention anything about telemetry (ie request data sent to those *.gw.postman.com endpoints). As a user, it would be great to know exactly what data is sent to Postman servers (eg we send resolved query strings, we don’t send headers, etc), as well as to have an easy way to opt out of telemetry altogether.
It’s annoying that the marketing and brand recognition has worked so well. My whole company uses postman and it’s a huge uphill battle to use anything else.
There are SO many alternatives. It’s curl UI wrapper with secrets* management! Why do we all need enterprise licenses??
Off-Topic: I read about yaak app as an alternative to Postman - can anyone recommend an alternative to Stoplight Studio for covering "the other side" by any means?
I loved to use their free desktop app for building API documentations which can be used for scaffolding / generating APIs but for some reason I don't remember right now I had to stop using it.
I stopped using Postman when it magically started connecting to a central server for… nothing useful, really. I have no idea why people would design software this way, especially a development tool that should work with any web server, under any network condition (including fully offline against localhost).
Now I just have a Makefile with a bunch of curl invocations, or Python tests with requests to match against expected responses.
We went with a mix of curl, Invoke-WebRequest, favourite scripting language, HTTP files, IDE tooling, Insomina, after Postman went cloud online and became a forbidden tool on our systems.
Also I am not counting that Insomina won't follow the same footsteps as Postman.
I wrote my own api invoker, https://placeholders.cc/api-invoker/, mainly because postman is slow, eats a ton of memory and it becomes more and more restrictive to non logged in users. In don't mind having an electron based application like open. but i hate to have 10 like it open in the same time.
Allow me to introduce you to Hurl: https://hurl.dev/
or you can just use curl :)
>Now I just have a Makefile with a bunch of curl invocations
There are several FOSS command line tools that can do this easier, e.g. https://httpie.io/cli
That syntax just seems slightly more confusing than curl, not easier except for very specific simple requests.
I find it's a more streamlined syntax, and has added-on stuff curl doesn't have to make rest testing easier, e.g. --session
Other than that, sure, mostly similar.
What about Bruno[1]?
1: https://www.usebruno.com/
+ 1. I just came across it a few months ago after getting fed up with Postman's unintuitive ever-changing UI, etc. So far so good. Easy to store bruno files in a repo to have a nice easy place to go to get test calls
tried it but had some buggy interface when i used it full-time earlier this year. (albeit i work in a slow vm)
it might have changed now but it did not support grpc endpoints, which was a dealbreaker for me. but definitely appreciate the project and i hope it reaches core feature parity soon.
+1 also. More than being open source and local, you can import your postman requests. It's almost 1:1.
I desperately want to like Bruno, since I think it might not do the same rugpull as Postman and Insomnia.
But the UX is just terrible (for me) or at least has been every time I've tried to start using it more.
I mean, come on, the most basic use of creating a request goes like this:
1. Sorry, can't let you create a request before you create a collection.
2. Sorry, can't let you create a collection before you make a decision on in which path you will be storing all your collections.
3. Sorry, can't let you create a request before you think of a good name for it.
etc.
Like what the heck? This should be just one click to create a new untitled request then fill in the URL and send.
At first I thought this might be growing pains since it was new but every year I try it and it hasn't improved.
Hurl (https://hurl.dev/) is quite good
People that want to make money on their software obviously.
Connecting to a license server is pretty much standard.
For Postman it is annoying because it was never explicitly stated and it seemed like they are cool kids making nice helpful app. But really they are in for money. Which is not bad have to say but the way they did it is bad.
I think they started as cool kids and they changed their mind on the way. I'm using postman for a long time. I liked it, i preferred the online version, slowly slowly they started to push users towards the app, making it harder and harder first to use it without and account, then to use the online version. This is how I ended up with a heavy desktop app, when i needed something simple and easy to use.
I switched to k6 the cli load test tool for its full js/ts scripting ability
Pretty obvious why if you use the software.
I get the whining, but teams need ways to share their complex workflows, and teams are where the money is for all dev focused software.
That's who pays for all your tools to have free versions.
People who use make and curl to jury rig some unshareable solution together that no-one else in their company would even bother trying to use aren't worth any money to companies.
My experience is the opposite.
Teams that are knowledgeable jury rig their own custom solutions without all the enterprise cruft. They make solutions that fix their problem and they do it faster than the teams who use bloated enterprise solutions.
I am tired of seeing over engineered enterprise solutions that that are implemented and never used because they can’t be integrated into the dev workflow easily. Simple bash script that does the task it was designed to do beats any enterprise crap.
The wisdom of pipes! I'd share these workflows the exact same way we share others [ie: BASH, Ansible]: Git. Needs nothing more than a directory, though an SSH daemon is quite nice.
Those of us who can survive without desperate monetization plays are worth quite a lot, actually. They say 'jury rig', we say 'engineer'.
The main problem with enterprise crap is portability. It only runs under very specific circumstances.
Bash and Perl scripts run, truly, everywhere - so you get real collaboration. I can share it with anyone on my team and they can use it.
Well written bash will run anywhere. Amateur bash will only run on the version of Mac OS it was written on, and even then only after the correct collection of random homebrew packages installed has been installed.
I agree, which is why I think most bash scripts should actually be Perl scripts. There, I said it.
> People who use make and curl to jury rig some unshareable solution together that no-one else in their company would even bother trying
???
Mash 'em, boil 'em, put 'em in git, next to your code?
>I get the whining, but teams need ways to share their complex workflows, and teams are where the money is for all dev focused software.
Complacent corporate teams. Agile teams need to simplify their workflows, and know that a Makefile can be better than some closed down, Cloud-first tool.
>That's who pays for all your tools to have free versions
Nah, we have free versions for stuff without enterprise editions too.
>People who use make and curl to jury rig some unshareable solution together that no-one else in their company would even bother trying
It's that "no-one else" that doesn't bring value.
> (...) teams need ways to share their complex workflows (...)
Apps like Postman are the wrong tool for this purpose.
If you want to share workflows, let alone complex workflows, any automated test suite is far better suited for this purpose.
We are in the age of LLMs and coding agents, which make BDD-style test frameworks even more relevant, as they allow developers to implement the workflows, verify they work, and leave behind an enforceable and verifiable human-readable description of those workflows.
You put them in your repo or file server. No need to have all these accounts and potentially leaks/attacks
Git is pretty good at sharing you know
Ah, yes, the cloud-dependent tool that forces you to pay per seat and log in for any type of collaboration is down when their cloud provider is.
Anyways, the folks have spoken, no need to double down. There are more than a dozen alternatives to it, and new ones are coming up.
I'm helping build a new one.
- Completely offline.
- Gives the ability to build reusable blocks (headers, query params, etc)
- Let's you document everything in Markdown.
- Imports your collections and cURLs.
https://voiden.md/
And yes. It's completely free. With plugin extensibility for anyone to build/install whatever they want.
The CEO committed to open-sourcing it, as well as to not monetize on anything that doesn't introduce operational costs to the team.
https://voiden.md/blog/why-we-rebuilt-bloated-api-tooling
A little bit of feedback, I could barely read any of the text in the interface as the contrast is almost zero and the font is unbelievably small. So I tried Cmd+ to zoom the interface, but nothing happened, so I tried Cmd, to open the settings to see if there was a zoom level or contrast setting, nothing happened. I like the idea of it, but it's totally unusable.
Hi! Thx for that. Can you please open an issue with a screenshot here: https://github.com/voidenhq/feedback
What you're saying doesn’t sound familiar whatsoever, but I'd really like to look more into it.
Voiden looks really promising, so I installed it to get started, and here's my hot takes so far before even using it.
* The text is tiny for my old eyes. I figured there's probably a setting for it and hit Cmd-, and found there's no settings UI whatsoever. No keyboard shortcut either it seems, and no help menu either, so no searching for "keyboard" with Shift-Cmd-/
* .void files may be markdown, but no markdown editor will recognize it as such. Maybe support .void.md as well. I also couldn't find any way to edit the markdown source of a .void file from voiden, which is a bit ironic for a tool that loudly advertises the markdown format as a central feature.
* Could there be a block that expands into the full URL of the request and parameters above it (or perhaps as args)? How about another that renders as a cURL command, which would cover POST/PUT/PATCH requests nicely too. My API documentation always has cURL request examples and I detest writing them by hand.
* While I'm suggesting blocks, one that renders the response headers/body to the preceding request would also be handy. It should support a placeholder response that gets replaced when the request is actually run (and perhaps a "save" button to persist it in the markdown). Responses get long, so maybe have a max-height for the block and make it scrollable
I'm actually really excited about Voiden and hope these can be addressed. It has a similar feel to Jetbrains' .http format, but an evolutionary leap beyond it. It also feels really raw and unfinished.
Hi, thx for the feedback! Testing the settings (including different themes and font sizes as we speak). Some tweaks are been made on the responses side as well. As per the rest of your comments, some of these things have been discussed or touched upon, others have been just added to the discussion board :)
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
> could have been a 10 Megabyte TUI app
Wow, in a world dominated by gigabytes of electron application, people thinks 10 MB is the optimal size for a simple utility TUI app.
As a reference, (from archlinux repo), vim’s install package is 2.3MB, curl is 1.2MB, lua (the complete language interpreter) is 362KB
To be fair, Vim and Curl are almost certainly dynamically linked, so they get to "cheat" a little. 10 megs is entirely reasonable for a statically linked utility intended to "just work" when you dump it somewhere in your $PATH.
Take the Micro editor. It's written in Go, and packs a fair bit of functionality into a single 12 meg static binary (of which a few megs is probably the runtime.)
640K ought to be enough for anyone.
- Bill Gates.
And:
The world does not need more than 4 computers.
-Ken Olsen, or someone (in the mainframe days).
(Both are alleged / apocryphal quotes. :)
I believe the Ken Olson quote was that nobody needed a computer in their house, but that was a time where businesses were using terminal servers... it would have been interesting to see where that would have went, but we might be heading that way again since we own nothing and everything is a only a temporary license.
The second quote was "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers", and it's attributed to Thomas Watson of IBM saying it in 1943. The real quote is indeed from Watson, but in 1953, summarizing the sales projections of a specific model of machine, and noting that they actually sold 18 of them.
https://freakonomics.com/2008/04/our-daily-bleg-did-ibm-real...
Gates denies ever saying anything like the 640K quote, but it was possibly someone at Microsoft being salty about the 640K limit that IBM had imposed on the PC through its design.
Indeed. It is the enigma of success in an industry with no franchise value.
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!
> even this kind of app manages to bring in Electron
Probably because it began as an chrome addon before it was "standalone".
Before Chrome became its addon*
Oooh this is neat! I've been using hurl (https://hurl.dev/) for the last few years and while it's fun, I've ended up with a ton of text files floating around a folder instead of any kind of organization. Might have to try this.
Posting has been the most lucrative option for me so far, but it'll take me some time to get used to the keybindings.
Because enteprise type devs love this shit
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.)
> 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.
Depending on your usage, you may not need a separate app. Jetbrains[0], Visual Studio[1] and VSCode[2] have support for http files.
[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/test/http-file...
[2]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...
The vscore one is a plugin from some random person, to be called built in
Insert xkcd 2347 here.
TIL about .http files. Thank you :)
Converted a bunch stuff just laying in my shell history into actual actionable files finally :D
Last time I checked, they don’t support the exact same format in each product.
Thus, we stick with hurl.
QA seems to stick to robot framework instead. Some use Bruno.
In our case, some non-devs use http apis too, notably QA. Bruno currently fills that role.
A lot of organizations have very large suites of postman collections that serve as API documentation, regression and QA testing… they often heavily rely on the postman Javascript libraries and have custom code embedded directly in the collection.
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.
$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.
Same at Apple; cannot use Postman.
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.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626691
Postman is little potatoes - take a look what was done with free YouTube. Bait and switch all the same only stretched in time.
It's the founding economic principle of the British empire
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.
We moved to bruno, we're quite happy with it.
To second this, I moved to Bruno after Postman became an 'online' tool awhile back and it's done exactly what I've needed since.
I'm at a smaller organization now, it was so nice when we all decided "no way" on Postman.
I switched all my stuff over to bruno. what are you using?
Same.
This is exactly why I made Yaak [1]. It's fully offline, no telemetry, open source, and can even sync with Git.
https://yaak.app
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.
[1]: https://yaak.app/open
Nice! Yep, trying to be as open and accessible as possible since so much of the industry is the opposite.
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
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!
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.
Without telemetry, how will you know that anyone at all is using your software let alone only within the agreement of any licensing terms?
You don't - ergo good faith.
You can be an Oracle and audit your customers and develop that adversarial relationship. The idea is that that sort of thing makes you rot in the long run.
How's that been going for Oracle so far?
Everyone of their executives can look forward to 10,000 years of burning in hell, so I’d say pretty badly
They may earn money but are totally rotten. They eat injured souls.
Pretty poorly actually, people avoid Oracle products like the plague. Nobody is buying a JVM from Oracle or buying their DB - they're using open source solutions that are both free and provide more features.
They have a lot of inerita, but that's it. If you're in Greenfield development, there is a close to 0% chance you will choose Oracle as your RDBMS.
Um, oops.
Hey, personally I agree. Why would I ever go with Oracle.
But that's A) me personally and B) me in Cloud/Startup type companies, so of course we don't got with Oracle.
But like you mentioned, inertia. So my previous gigs that were large multi-national of course were all Oracle. And they were all huge and had zero reason to not just buy the Oracle tax. Which is why Oracle is going strong.
Despite all the rage, Oracle can still survive quite some time on running boring things like I don't know, many large banks and other boring old businesses. Which of those is really gonna go "AWS Aurora MySQL" when the have had an in-house "Oracle Exadata" run their entire business operation "just fine" for longer than those Cloud providers have even be around?
I am sure everyone making shareware in the early 1990's would have loved to spy on people to know how many used their software for free (and have a way to spam those users to try to sell more licenses), but they couldn't and just did without that.
Excellent work! Looking forward your post about some milestone ARR boundary, the gory details of how you got there.
My runway reaches infinity around $10k MRR so I'll likely do a post around then. Currently 11% of the way there!
I was going to gripe about the price but $50/dev/year is actually pretty reasonable! Nice!
Thank you for your honest and detailed answer! Great to see it’s working so far and this allows you to build a true OSS product in the meantime, i really appreciate that (i think this is the biggest benefit of your licensing scheme)
I really like that, a scaling license!
I have a suggestion:
Under pricing for the hobby tier you could add as free or pay what you want. $50/yr isn't crazy but might get a few smaller donations if that was an avenue.
I currently direct these people to sponsor on GitHub
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.
So you sold insomnia, sold it, and then created another competing tool? There where no restrictions in the deal?
Non-competes expire
I love a solo dev building from scratch is going up against an entire team and company who have years of head start, alot more money and a product that the solo dev originally wrote for them.
And the solo dev has a better product already and might actually win haha.
Underdog story.
Rooting for you!
Ya, it's so funny to be going up against a 1000+ person company as a solo dev!
Underdog? More like topdog!
Hey @gschier this is awesome. I've been a long time user of Insomnia and since the acquisition it's ever so slowly, well... it's been a challenge for me.
I didn't know you created Yaak!
I just downloaded Yaak and it's been awesome, thank you!
I downloaded this through AUR on Arch and one bit of feedback is that I wish you'd make the sig verification a whole bunch easier, thanks!
I fell in love with Insomnia pre-acquisition so I'm thrilled to see it has a spiritual successor. Good on you Greg.
I was so sad to see its decline after I left. Had to make it right.
Currently using Bruno. Saw your comparison. If Bruno has everything I need, what would you say is your biggest benefit compared to Bruno?
Faster, smoother, GRPC, plugins, themes, fully open source, no telemetry,...
Thanks! I will try it out. Looks awesome. Bruno also supports grpc, though. Also, in what way is Yaak more open source than bruno?
Nice!
This looks great. If you can wait 8 years before you sell out, that should be long enough for me to retire. Give me a headsup if they offer you a billion earlier so I can start looking for Yaak's replacement.
I've already sold once, and regretted it. I'm aiming to call Yaak "done" in the next few years and use it to fund my* retirement. See you there
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.
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.
You get a 30-day trial
That Hotdog theme is stunning but I'm not sure if I mean "it's beautiful" or "it makes my head hurt."
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.
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?
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.
Wrote this late at night and didn’t explain what I meant by X11 view.
I was thinking back to running X sessions on remote machines, sending for example a text editor view back across the network to my desktop.
VSCode remote feels to my fiftysomething brain to be logically quite like that, only you are sending the display back from the remote worker using web techniques, and rather than to a display manager, you are sending it back into the shell of an editor, so it appears to be largely indistinguishable from a session running on your local machine.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but I think what you want already exists as VSCodes remote SSH tunnel port forwarding (not the one that makes it publicly accessible).
Startup a dev server on the remote machine and forward the port to localhost. It should now be accessible via http://localhost:[port] on your local machine in the browser or any application, as if it’s running locally.
I find it’s very useful for also for interacting with DBs/Redis. Just forward the port your DB communicates on and use whatever client on your local machine to interact with it.
As far as I know this works with any service that communicates via TCP
Yeah, it would help with using the tool to access a private-to-the-remote API.
Won't immediately help with giving that tool access to the file system or Git.
For a local VM, you can have file system mounts, fast enough for Git.
SSHFS could help in some genuinely distant remotes with access to the file system (though SSHFS in the context of multiple file writers is fraught with risk of file corruption; been there, bought that T-shirt).
With properly network-remote VMs, nothing helps that much with giving the tool access to performing Git operations on changes inside your remote: Git is slow over network file systems even when they are quite local.
This is the real power of the VS Code remote after all; everything happens there.
probably too much work for a solo dev
The REST Book extension was made by a VS Code dev and does a decent enough chunk of what is needed, at least for simple use cases.
Handy Dandy Notebook as well, but that requires some reformulation to get everything in terms of standard curl/node/python/etc commands. (whether that’s better or worse than a custom http dsl is a matter of some debate)
Also: httpBook - Rest Client
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.
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.
Awesome. Downloaded. Thanks!
Enjoy!
RapidAPI (ex. Paw) does that AFAIK.
Also, it’s an amazing app.
Still mad about the boring rebrand from Paw but it is still a nice app
Hey Greg! Can you clarify that building from source and using in a commerical environment is permissable under the MIT license? I have built from source and yet the program is under "trial mode" currently and looks to have a 30 day ticker of doom. Is this a bug? Is there a flag missing? I cannot find any detailed instructions on setting flags or environment variables to turn this off.
Thanks!
How are you running it? The code for the license management and badge are not included by default when running "npm start" or "npm run app-build".
And yes, you can indeed run the OSS yourself for commercial purposes.
I built a binary using the `tauri.release.conf.json` as my config file
That'll do it. That config is used for the production build of Yaak that's downloadable from the website. Just running "tauri build" or "npm run app-build" is what you want.
was going to say "what makes this better than Insomnia" before i saw this!
> Having created and sold Insomnia in 2019
Hahah, ya... :)
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.
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
Hey, happy user of Yaak here, thanks for building this. Wish you success and peace.
Just noticed that with my star on GitHub it now has over 9000 stars!
No way. Queue the gif!
Clearly there should be a super useful widget in the interface that prominently displays the number of GitHub stars !
Hey thanks, this looks great. I'm still on Paw but I've been looking for something new since it's been languishing as "RapidAPI" for years.
First time hearing about this app, sounds like it totally fits my use case. Gotta give it a try!
Quick request, if it's doable: would you mind making a portable version of this? We're super locked down on our machines (even as developers), and all programs that need to be installed need to be approved. Portable programs fly under the radar, so they're easier to try discreetly, then we can make an official request to get them approved or buy a license.
Edit: oh my, you also made Insomnia, that I used when Postman was on the enshittification path...
This looks awesome! I've been wondering what to do with Insomnia since its enshittification.
One idea: since you are doing good-faith licenses anyway, maybe you could add in the possibility to pay for some kind of one-time license? I don't particularly need or want updates from my API tool, I just want it to work and not break. I would be fine with paying a one time commercial license that gives non expiring right to use a particular version.
I think this is covered by lifetime fallback license, under pricing->FAQ - but not sure, seems so.
Yep, that's what the fallback is for
Ah, fantastic! Thanks again.
One thing I despise about postman is how much friction there is to creating a new request. In my line of work, I'm often using an API client as a scratch pad to validate /poc. At the same time, it would be nice to just have a simple "history" that I could go back and search if I needed to find some request I made a few weeks ago.
Thanks for making this. May this stay un-enshittified by VC money for a very long time.
Yep, no VC! Though I have invested 2 years of my own living expenses into it, trying to make it work.
Hey Greg!
Hey! Who's this?
You're already going down the path Postman did. No way I'm using that.
How so? It's completely open source and doesn't rely on cloud accounts or servers. It's also just me. Postman has 1000 employees and $200M+ in funding
you use it until he fucks it up and then switch to the next guy.
These api clients are rocket science, the barrier for entry is very low.
This is my retirement project. I'd like to call it "done" within 2 years
Surprised to see no one's mentioned HTTPie yet. I reach out for their web app anytime I have to make a one off network request: https://httpie.io/app
Web app. The entire point here is using something local and not web based
It is a CLI app. I didn't even know that they had added a web frontend to it. Try this: https://httpie.io/cli
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
Question: Do I miss something by not using Postman? My alternatives for development are "Edit and Resend" of a request (in Firefox) and plain old curl scripts for reusable examples.
Not Postman specifically but a client like that will allow you to prepare a whole set of different requests and save them so you can build up a test suite, plus some of them do things like scripting, chaining requests together etc. It's like the difference between a text editor and an IDE, so it depends on your needs really.
I use a mix of tools, depending on needs: `curl` scripts for things I might need to automate on barebones OS installations (Linux/macOS), HTTPie on my local CLI env if I'm debugging something where I need to mutate parameters quickly: making sequential calls, many requests with varying parameters; and Insomnia as GUI where I can save requests with parameters, headers, etc. to be re-used during development.
Each one has its strengths, and weaknesses, Insomnia can export the saved requests as `curl` commands so it's a nice visualisation to iterate over a complex call until it's working, and then be exported if needed to be automated; `curl` is quite ubiquitous but clunky to remember the exact arguments I might need; HTTPie has a nice argument syntax so it's quite readable to be quickly edited but isn't present without installing Python, pip, and pulling it.
We use it a bit at our company. We have a collection file that includes a ton of requests with headers and body. Developers can with ease load that collection file and run it against their own server, and also quickly change to a different server with just a click.
I guess a substitution would be a git repo with curl scripts and environment variables?
We also have some non-tech people who use postman to run tests.
A closer replacement would be https://hurl.dev or the HTTP client built in to every JetBrains IDE + <https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-cli.html#tes...>, depending on what other tools your org uses.
+1 to .http file support in JetBrains and VS proper
> I guess a substitution would be a git repo with curl scripts and environment variables?
Yep, and works well for us.
I used to use postman, before they become greedy, now I use Bruno.
But to your question - I have saved based authenticated request to our company useful APIs - github/jira/artifactory - so when I want to string together some micro tool to do something in batch, I don't have to remember where do I create API key, and how do they accept it.
The UI/UX, however you can get similar workflows in Insomina (while it doesn't follow Postman's footsteps), and IDE tooling.
We use it at my work because one team will create the backend, and another team will create the frontend, and its useful to be able to share a big list of all the endpoints, along with how to use them and the expected result that can all be run, as well as handling all the auth for you
OpenAPI also has examples and auth. But, like Postman, it is tied to your service, not some 3rd party.
These days I use jupyter notebooks and requests.
At the end of the day with Postman you wind up trying to codify requests via collections, which tends to just be programming in a more limited language.
The only nice feature is being able to paste a url, get parsed parameters, and then edit all the things using the UI.
Other then that, its same old curl.
Being able to easily switch between dev, stage and prod is useful
In terms of just issuing requests, you can do the same with either python or curl and just scrips.
No, but you probably miss something for not using HTTPie
https://www.usebruno.com/
I made a very simple lightweight yaml based Postman alternative called `yapi`.
https://github.com/jamierpond/yapi
Run this:
With this file: Or just `yapi` to use fzf to find configs.That's a really great concept and I could see how one could get used to the workflow with this!
But, why such low stats on github?! I guess everyone is jamming on postman, eh?
If you take a peek at the commit history [1], you'll see that the project started only last week with some very vague commit messages. The code is also quite messy and unoptimized. It's a cool project but not exactly industry-level software.
[1] https://github.com/jamierpond/yapi
will be tidying/optimising as i use it more. PRs are welcome! this is totally a tool i made just for me, to solve my problems. hopefully other people like it too.
Bruno + git has been perfect for our team. Collections in the repo, no external dependencies, works offline. Should have switched years ago.
I had a weird issue when trying to import via pasting curls. I got fixed, and it’s been totally 100% great otherwise
If you're willing to use a CLI, you can try Hurl [1]. It's is an Open Source cli using libcurl to run and test HTTP requests with plain text. We use libcurl for the reliability, quickness and top features (HTTP/3 IPv6 for instance) and there are features like:
- requests chaining,
- capturing and passing data from a response to another request,
- response tests (JSONPath, XPath, SSL certs, redirects etc...)
There is nice syntax sugar for requesting REST/SOAP/GraphQL APIs but, at the core, it's just libcurl! You can export you files to curl commands for instance. (I'm one of the maintainers)
[1]: https://hurl.dev
Apparently Postman needs to be online in order to send “telemetry”: https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...
'Telemetry' that, among other offenses, secretly leaks customer secrets that they expressly claim to protect, according to that post.
"needs"...
Posting (https://posting.sh/) is a pretty cool alternative I’ve used in the past. There’s no reason I can see why I would use a SaaS product for this.
I don’t personally use Postman, but at work we use .http files, which are easy to version and manage with Git. The downside is that you’re almost entirely tied to VS Code and the REST Client extension. I’m not a big fan of VS Code myself (I use Vim), so if anyone interested, I created resterm [0] - a terminal client that works with .http or .rest files and adds some extra "nice-to-have" features. I’m currently working on adding OpenAPI spec importing.
https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm
+1 for .http files
Also, TIL that these are not IntelliJ-specific (that’s where I use them)
I highly recommend checking out the postman forum for posts about the scratchpad being removed, it's a fascinating and frustrating read.
It would be so much faster and easier for the postman reps to just shut down the conversation. And yet, for some reason, they keep it going for very long while still being extremely evasive when it comes to any concern raised about data sovereignty.
We have moved all our stuff to Bruno nowadays.
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...
not possible once you sign away your allegiance to a VC
There seems to be a common theme here. Some project gets traction, it works very well. Then they got VC money and the project turn to crap for the community. Not all VC project, but seems to be common theme. I also aware that devs need funding to keep a project going for the long run. Are there any better alternatives for funding now days?
Not sure if this applies to Postman specifically, but I think a lot of software projects start out largely as hobby projects, and might not have even had an ambition of making serious money out of it, and as such there's no reason to be hostile to the community.
Then a VC fund gives these developers a dumptruck full of money and expect returns immediately afterward. Something like Postman likely doesn't make a ton of money unless they're doing something anti-consumer like selling data.
sign in, you mean.
sign away means getting rid of vcs.
I understood it as giving it up, not getting rid of. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Give+It+Away
I read that as "sign your allegiances away from their current counterparts (e.g. the user) and towards the VCs instead".
One of the things I've thought about for startups are things with the general theme of "complete control over your data", how could I write something like this into the articles of incorporation (or similar) to make some of those values at least somewhat irrevocable?
When Postman started becoming shit, I started using Insomnia, which is also turning into shit now.
I heard Bruno is good, but haven’t used it. Apparently everything is in a file, which is an appreciable idea.
I've been using Bruno for a couple of years, there are some rough edges but overall it's very good.
Been using Bruno. It’s good, only complaint is it has some dark mode quirks.
I switched to Bruno, it's pretty nice, no complaints.
Good thing is that we can start using Insomnium now.
It is unmaintained.
This is the cost of devs focusing on corporate gains and not their craft.
Why you and other devs say Insomnia is unmaintained?
There has been a release in september, issues has been solved within last month, and multiple pull requests has been managed (merged and rejected) also recently.
Maybe you refer to issues specific to a platform? Thanks in advance.
Insomnium
Devs have to eat and if someone offers you a life altering amount of money to work on their hobby project, a lot of them would probably take it. It's hard to turn down something that might assure your family a comfortable life.
That's all good, and I hope they're happy, but they shouldn't expect their audience to stick around if they start to ruin the project that got them there.
Sure, but why does it always have to lead to users getting the short end of the stick? Why can't they accept money and NOT screw over the users? And if the choice is between "Take VC money and screw users" and "Reject VC money and happy users", why do 99% of the people take the first option? They're most likely software developers (as this is the context), so it isn't really a choice between "uncomfortable life" or "comfortable life", there is something more going on here.
This is not what I said. I meant that users should contribute and not expect FOSS projects as a separate channel of getting material for their corporate work.
I want to judge the devs for it but if a VC walked up to me with a bag full of cash and the opportunity to work full time on a passion project I can’t be anywhere near sure I’d say no.
That bag full of cash will keep being a bag full of cash but the passion project will likely become driven by whoever hands you the bag and will head towards their goals, not yours. Anyway you'll keep the cash. It's not different from what the vast majority of us do with our jobs every day.
Do you apply the same logic to your plumber? Your accountant? The 'craft' is something you do for customers in order to make money to eat.
The plumber doesn't start to install additional pipes that require an annual fee, or spying on me "because you know, nothing to hide", or any other nonsense we are seeing in software.
Which is why plumbers don't get VC money and salaries aren't as high.
If you're on macOS, try Paw/RapidAPI https://paw.cloud They may be affected by AWS.
Stopped using postman from about 2018 I think. I think it was because I found it stupid to have to log-in to do API queries.
I didn't even find it that ergonomic to use, to be fair.
I built chapar for the same reasons. It’s an open source postman alternative, currently supporting rest and grpc and scripting with python.
Fully local and no hidden proxy. https://github.com/chapar-rest/chapar
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.
0 - https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html
Same but since a lot of bigger scenarios I need to test the scripting quickly becomes a lot so I often do this using Groovy (as I am a Java developer this is nearly the same). I now have a collection of scripts I often reuse and adapt.
I'm looking at alternatives that are guarantee to work locally and only found the following:
Posting.sh -> Postman imports are experimental which makes it a non-starter for people like myself with large Postman collections. TUI only also makes it harder to switch.
Insomnia -> Owned by another large tech company.
Yaak -> Made by the same guy who created AND SOLD Insomnia above. Not exactly comforting to switch over for. How long till this one also gets sold?
Any other great local tools out there? I would like to be done with Postman.
There’s also Bruno!
« Offline only - We take security and privacy seriously. Bruno is an offline tool and there is no syncing of your data to any cloud »
https://www.usebruno.com/
Restfox [1] is worth checking out. It's fully offline and lets you version control your collections with git or any sync tool you prefer. The postman import is well tested and the app also allows you to export back to Postman collections.
Disclaimer: I maintain it.
[1] https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox
I ctrl+f'ed to find Restfox to also give my recommendation. It's a great tool, thanks for maintaining it! :-)
I use a simple bash script:
used like: I know it doesn't have the functionality of postman, but this is how I build up interactions with a new API.I would like to put the request body into a file and use it with `@file.json`.
I'm one of the creators of Kreya [1]. We were one (or the) first to support a fully-offline, git-centric local data storage in this space.
Kreya is privacy-first since its first commit five years ago, since we were fed up with Postman and Insomnia. Happy to answer any questions
[1] https://kreya.app
RapidAPI for Mac, formerly Paw, it's free for individuals.
https://paw.cloud/
Self host Yaade. If you dont have a server run it locally in a Docker container.
I just memorized curl like a lunatic.
I moved from Postman to RapidAPI when Postman tried to get me to sign up for their cloud service just migrate my data to a new laptop.
It isn't working locally for quite some time now, hence why many companies have forbidden using Postman, given the issue of testing internal APIs with security information hosted on Postman servers.
OK which dumb engineer unsafely wrapped the entire feature flagging / observability / telemetry tooling around the main process of the app such that it wouldn't load unless those libraries resolved?
The red flag appeared a few years ago already. My company forbade us to use it. This wan no problem for me, because I mostly use curl, but people got upset. We thought this too much restrictive, but ...
I migrated to insomnia.rest when postman required logging in for basic functionality.
I'm using an old version of Postman with their servers blocked through the system hosts file. I keep meaning to migrate to whatever the next best thing is but this setup just works for me.
This makes me feel more justified in using Posting in my terminal these days.
I love Yaak. After using Postman for many years, I appreciate how straightforward it is without being bloated.
That being said, it would be awesome to have something inside Yaak where I could test API endpoints, like integration tests for APIs.
It connects to their servers when it starts up; have to assume their server is down. It used to be so much nicer before they added this "feature".
Don't you love how slimeballs cant help themselves though? Instead of just letting free and easy happen the one time a year they go down... they just spit in everyones face to remind them now they have time to go find an alternative
Yeah I was pretty damn mad when I opened postman and it was completely unusable. Can safely say I'm done with it now.
I ditched Postman for Insomnia (Open source) after Postman refused to adhere to customers to disable auto-updates for 6 years+. I checked on their GitHub issue tracker and it turns out, the solution was to upgrade to their "Enterprise plan".
https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/69...
So, I said fuck it and switched to a real, open source alternative, Insomnia, instead:
https://insomnia.rest
I am against government regulation, but at times likes this (or your sous vide and washing machine requiring online accounts to function) the idea for regulations that mandate availability of local server for client server applications is alluring. And making all cloud functionality optional.
Or just use an alternative, and there are plenty of them in that segment, no need for the legislator to do anything here.
Just use an alternative is not a long term solution when we talk about customer rights. Because the enshitification marches trough the products.
Happy with https://yaak.app/so far
Hey, I'm the creator of Yaak! Let me know how it could be even better :)
I'm stealing your thread to ask a question: How would you explain what an API Client is to someone who's never used one before, and has always just consumed/produced/tested API's the old-fashioned way?
Is it basically "an IDE for playing with API's"?
Is it only for HTTP-based API's?
Does it come with canned functionality for popular services out there?
I read this but still don't feel like I fully understand what it does https://www.postman.com/api-platform/api-client/
EDIT: This blog post https://schier.co/blog/call-for-beta-testers made it click a little better: "...app that makes testing REST APIs super easy"
Hi, importing Postman's environments would be nice.
And different colors for GET/POST/PUT.. etc methods, maybe :)
Do you have any plans for scripting?
Flatpak and snap please
It's a bit lower on the priority list, but it'll get there https://feedback.yaak.app/p/flatpak-and-flathub
Don’t encourage snap.
Why not?
Personal feelings aside, snap is working fine. It's maybe a bit slow on startup, but that's it.
Every single time I’ve installed anything with snap I’ve regretted it. It causes all sorts of annoying issues, including e.g. preventing integration between apps because of its supposed security model. This is typical of consumer operating systems, like Windows, but not what should be encouraged on Linux.
On top of that, Canonical is pushing snap very hard. Try to uninstall the Firefox snap - e.g. because it doesn’t integrate well with password managers - and install it using apt from the Mozilla repo. Ubuntu will later just silently replace it back with the snap version.
I’m about to switch away from Ubuntu as a result of this.
I feel bad for the engineering team that has to implement it all this way. Hang in there folks.
https://httpyac.github.io/guide/installation_vscode.html
I used to use Postman years ago; I never will again. These days I just use cURL and sometimes a rest client mode inside of whichever IDE I'm using.
Woah didn’t know it was down but I’ve been facing issues for a while so switched to Bruno by someone’s recommendation and it’s pretty tight
https://justuse.org/curl/
Someone should make a better one called Getman.
maybe it doesn't do everything postman does, but I'm very happy using the rest client extension in vs code, the http files with the api calls are commited to the source code repository along with the code is easy to use, does what i need, and is easy to share with my colleagues.
Despite the strength of marketing, "DIY" is sometimes more reliable than "pay fees to so-called "tech" company"" and subject oneself to possibility of telemetry, data collection, surveillance and targeted advertising. But every user is different
For recreational internet use, I use yy025 + TCP client + TLS proxy. No fees, no telemetry, no BS. I can select from a long list of TCP clients in this setup, e.g., original netcat, tcploop, tcpclient, socat, etc., as well as a variety of TLS proxies, e.g., tinyproxy+stunnel, haproxy, etc. I can modify the source of all the programs and can do more than is possible if using an "HTTP client", e.g., curl
Of course I am not testing "web apps" for a commercial enterprise. Nor do I use a so-called "modern", graphical browser. I retrieve data without a browser. Since I use HTTP every day in textmode it is "interesting"^1 to see software that somehow commercialises similar HTTP use, e.g., Postman, Burp, etc.
1. For example, https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/postman-valuation-2-bill...
But why does the app stop working if telemetry can't be sent? Who engineered this?
How many other offline and online things failed unexpectedly due to the aws outage?
Bruno is quite good with postman compatibility and it's own syntax
Postman is absolutely shit since it was sold. Stop using it.
Just use cURL.
It will never disappear, enshittify, or let you down. It's already modern, and has a great UI. It's available everywhere. It supports every protocol and feature under the sun. Those fancy features you think you need: you don't. Whatever you're missing can be easily added via simple shell scripts or aliases.
> It will never disappear
They started hardening our images and curl went poof.
I switched to Insomnia, seems not as bloated for my use-case.
Isomnium is even better, although it's been archived.
Stop using Postman and its ilk. Use .http files.
just use bruno+git https://www.usebruno.com/
i'm still using postman v9 from 2022, which is pre-bloat and good software.
I will phase out this tool, definely
lately I really enjoyed using http files for sharing http example requests
Mine used to be all local too, but then it required me to login online in order to work.
But mine is still working locally now. If it stops working locally, what even is the point anymore?
In the beginning, there was Postman, and we used it, and it was good. Then, Postman became enshittified, so we switched to Insomnia. Then, Insomnia became enshittified, so we switched to Bruno. Then, Bruno became enshittified, so now it's Yaak.
Let's see how long it takes for one of these programs to break the cycle.
And each of those are just thin wrappers around curl I guess. We should be glad that some good free software could be produced in the past to serve as the foundation for today's greed.
And Dropbox is a thin wrapper around rsync. Tools like Postman are convenient. JS scripting allows to extend it easily, like to make request with random test data. Anyway, the previous company I worked for banned it, as soon as it switched from local files to cloud based "collections". Older versions would be ok, but like others mentioned, Postman doesn't like to hear "no" when trying to auto-update itself.
just use curl
Hello all,
Postman founder here. I did not time this with an AWS outage of this magnitude but I posted about filesystem, git, and offline support coming to Postman last week: https://x.com/a85/status/1978979495836356819?s=46
Postman has a lot of capabilities now that require the cloud but there is still an offline client built in just for requests.
Building sign-in and cloud features were not due to a VC-led conspiracy. A large number of companies depend on APIs (like AWS) and have thousands of services and APIs. Customers need to manage them and wanted us to build it.
Please can you address the claim that Postman is silently leaking customer secrets to your servers as part of telemetry?
https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...
Yes. The post is misleading and we have more detail on what we do here.
https://blog.postman.com/engineering/postman-free-is-secure-...
Postman allows for turning off history, keeping variables local, setting up a local vault all in the free product and in more advanced plans, there are secret scanning capabilities for IT and security teams.
https://blog.postman.com/choose-the-right-postman-plan-for-y...
These issues are not unique to Postman and apply to all cloud products like GitHub as an instance. Products that are “offline” just shift the burden to the user.
All good security measures, for sure, but the blog post you linked doesn’t mention anything about telemetry (ie request data sent to those *.gw.postman.com endpoints). As a user, it would be great to know exactly what data is sent to Postman servers (eg we send resolved query strings, we don’t send headers, etc), as well as to have an easy way to opt out of telemetry altogether.
Thats why I self host Yaade https://docs.yaade.io (shameless plug lol)
restfox for the win
Umm, just wondering why you never unplugged it from the internet for a few days(or forever)?
Yeah they really turned their product into over-complicated garbage instead of focusing on doing one thing well.
It’s annoying that the marketing and brand recognition has worked so well. My whole company uses postman and it’s a huge uphill battle to use anything else.
There are SO many alternatives. It’s curl UI wrapper with secrets* management! Why do we all need enterprise licenses??
*and the secrets were all exposed in logs!!
That is true of many software companies these days.
Enshittification, happens to every venture or private equity backed business
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Off-Topic: I read about yaak app as an alternative to Postman - can anyone recommend an alternative to Stoplight Studio for covering "the other side" by any means?
I loved to use their free desktop app for building API documentations which can be used for scaffolding / generating APIs but for some reason I don't remember right now I had to stop using it.