Show HN: Restfox – Open source lightweight alternative to Postman

No -- I used and paid for PAW for a while. I gave up on all MacPaw products once I realized their sales staff contacted me after I asked them not to -- they immediately lost me as customer. They just wanted to 'help' me get on to a more expensive plan that was for Teams.

There are plenty of great alternatives: HTTPie is one I like. Haven't found a good alternative to CleanMyMac yet though.

Postman is $15, it just takes a bit more than 3 months to surpass the price :P

I’ve been using it for a long time and I’d happily pay $100 for it.

It can consume swagger/openapi docs and generate calls. It can generate code snippets and cURL requests. You can extract values from one response body to use as a variable in another request, the built in features go on and on- and there’s a decent extension ecosystem/write your own.

Most importantly, it just works, and it works well and quickly, with pretty much any auth scheme I’ve ever had to deal with.

I’ve only got really a couple of nits with the stand-alone version.

I still can’t figure out how to make it “use the same auth scheme” for every single request globally. Each request requires the auth config, but this is solved by just copying an existing request and starting from that. This could very well be my lack of knowledge, though I feel like I know the tool well.

The .paw file is binary and doesn’t do well checked into source control if you’ve got more than one person using it.

The Teams version, which requires a monthly sub kinda/sorta mimics a git style branch strategy for merging different members changes and handles the team problem pretty well.

All in all though, it is absolutely and BY FAR the best request tool I’ve ever used. A great combination of simple just get out of the way and advanced automation strategies. I use it every day.

EDIT TO ADD:

I forgot to mention their license is still a lifetime license. I paid them $50, probably 6 years ago now, and have never been forced to pay them another dime. I’d pay per major version or do the IntelliJ perpetual fallback if it came to it, but I’ve never once been bait and switched (looking at you Tower2).

It's quite nice. I think it's worth it but you could always do the same for free/cheaper with other tools out there and/or curl.

Depends on how much you value a tool like this. And it's a one-time purchase for life, not a subscription.

My favorite testing HTTP Client is still just the IntelliJ built-in, pure text. You know exactly what you send without having to navigate menus and whatnot. In the end, 99% of HTTP requests are just that, text.