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Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

blog.getpostman.com

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Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#121

Post by [deleted] »

endorphone wrote: post #115
remote_phone wrote: post #86

Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages. I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. Most people expect things for free or very cheap and I blame the Apple App Store for that. Everyone expects their software to be free or $0.99 nowadays. Even $3.99 is considered too expensive. All this is doing is creating deflation in our industry. Software should be expensive…

The belief that software should be free long precedes any app stores ("I paid $N for the computer, why should I have to pay for the software‽‽‽"). It's especially weird to peg the blame on the Apple App Store given that it has managed to get people to spend billions on flippant stuff they would never have paid a penny for. In the pre-app store days it was incredibly difficult to make a business selling software if yo…

[deleted]

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#122

Post by jka »

remote_phone wrote: post #86

Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages. I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. Most people expect things for free or very cheap and I blame the Apple App Store for that. Everyone expects their software to be free or $0.99 nowadays. Even $3.99 is considered too expensive. All this is doing is creating deflation in our industry. Software should be expensive…

Software doesn't have to be written by companies - see: GNU/Linux, vim, Python, VLC, Jitsi... and the list could continue for a long time.

People do have non-financial motivations for developing software (accessibility improvements, creating community value, solving their own personal challenges or problems).

If you think this trend is going to change, I'd suspect (but can't guarantee of course) that you might be mistaken. Costs are going to continue to reduce, and software is going to continue to be easier to build, distribute and replicate; meanwhile new generations of developers will continue to expand the pool of participants in our software communities.

There are huge parts of the world now coming online which will simply not want (or be able) to pay the kind of salaries or fees that enterprises and software developers have been accustomed to receiving for their services.

Is it unreasonable to expect good software for low cost (or even free) if we have ample people, motivation, and ability to produce it, and if we enjoy a worldwide net benefit from it as a result?

The way I'd rephrase the situation is: how are investors and enterprise incumbents going to adjust if this trend continues, and what's a good way to ensure that as an individual you can participate and thrive in a world if this continues to happen.

A hint/suggestion from my biased opinion is that social safety nets are important, and nations that provide those for their communities will free up developers and resources to build the software and services that everyone really needs, rather than having developers spend their time on (yes high-paid, yes comfortable -- but broadly beneficial towards executives-and-investor class rather than community or nation) work.

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#123

Post by cas8 »

lowdose wrote: post #107
gmaster1440 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem like it supports Windows, so in many people's case (including mine) not a viable alternative. Otherwise looks like a great product.

I don't know any dev on a Windows setup, it's either Linux or MacOS. So this is a very serious question and I even up voted you out of interest. Do you own the admin rights to your dev work setup?

Sounds like you don't know a diverse set of devs. Mac/Linux may be the hot stuff for people you see at bootcamps and conferences, but there are tons of devs whose primary dev box is Windows.

I've got both a Mac Pro and a beefy PC at my desk but 99% of my time is spent on the PC. And yes, I do have admin rights over my setup.

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#124

Post by gmaster1440 »

lowdose wrote: post #107
gmaster1440 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem like it supports Windows, so in many people's case (including mine) not a viable alternative. Otherwise looks like a great product.

I don't know any dev on a Windows setup, it's either Linux or MacOS. So this is a very serious question and I even up voted you out of interest. Do you own the admin rights to your dev work setup?

Yeah, own the admin rights and all. With features like first-class linux kernels [1] and modern terminals [2], Windows is becoming more and more a first-class, developer-friendly OS.

[1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about

[2] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-windo...

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#125

Post by basseq »

(Cross-posted from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831)

I don't know anything about Postman, but this is an interesting case study on price increases. No one likes price increases, but they happen. So long as you have a strong ROI use case, you can navigate those discussions with your customers. E.g., "You were getting a 50x return, but listen, we're running a business over here, and a 45x return is still pretty darn good."

The challenge in Postman's case appears to be that they ALSO reduced the bundle components. So you compound the perception from "paying more" to "paying more but getting less". That's worse optics.

What I'd offer you think about is this may be a perfectly rational and even optimal customer solution. It's unifying two different pricing actions: price increase and product bundling. The logic being that many customers weren't using all the users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and integrations that were previously included in, say, the Pro bundle.

So as opposed to increasing price by—I'm making up numbers here—12% and leaving bundle elements the same, they increased price by 10% and cut features by 2%. The end result is exactly the same, but is actually better for most customers because they will get the same level of features they needed and not have to pay that additional 2% for features they weren't using anyway.

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#126

Post by solarkraft »

lowdose wrote: post #107
gmaster1440 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem like it supports Windows, so in many people's case (including mine) not a viable alternative. Otherwise looks like a great product.

I don't know any dev on a Windows setup, it's either Linux or MacOS. So this is a very serious question and I even up voted you out of interest. Do you own the admin rights to your dev work setup?

I work on WPF apps on Windows (it's pretty frustrating).

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#127

Post by satyrnein »

remote_phone wrote: post #86

Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages. I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. Most people expect things for free or very cheap and I blame the Apple App Store for that. Everyone expects their software to be free or $0.99 nowadays. Even $3.99 is considered too expensive. All this is doing is creating deflation in our industry. Software should be expensive…

Of course we should drive down prices to $0, that's practically the definition of progress. Our whole value proposition is the ability to offer more for less.

People should use Postman if the premium price is worth it to them over Insomnia, Postwoman, etc, not out of some sense of obligation. A business full of expensive developers is not a charity.

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#128

Post by solarkraft »

Semaphor wrote: post #120
lowdose wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know any dev on a Windows setup, it's either Linux or MacOS. So this is a very serious question and I even up voted you out of interest. Do you own the admin rights to your dev work setup?

Windows, C#, formerly Visual Studio, now Rider. Of course with admin rights. Do you realize .NET is pretty big in the business world, long before it even became cross platform with netcore or there being a crossplatform IDE?

What are the main benefits? Have you tried using it for WPF? Unfortunately I let my test license expire before I could test much, but remember that it felt a lot less awful than Visual Studio.

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#129

Post by tus88 »

penagwin wrote: post #114
tus88 wrote: post #100

Curl is free man.

I enjoy testing HTTP endpoints by bit-banging an ethernet cable so that I don't have to buy a computer. In all seriousness - Regardless of the solution Postman/Postwomen/Insomnia/Paw/etc - People use these tools so they can easily manipulate any part of their query, without needing to lookup curl flags and nuances. Serious question: How do you construct complex curl requests? Do you do it all on the command line? Or…

It's all REST these days, sometimes with JSON payloads. Nothing too hard to mangle together.

Re: Announcing Updated Postman Plans and Pricing

#130

Post by basseq »

basseq wrote: post #125

(Cross-posted from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012831 ) I don't know anything about Postman, but this is an interesting case study on price increases. No one likes price increases, but they happen. So long as you have a strong ROI use case, you can navigate those discussions with your customers. E.g., "You were getting a 50x return, but listen, we're running a business over here, and a 45x return is still…

Note that the alternative here would be to just increase price by the full 12% and change nothing else. Then later you can cut features and price by 2%, which people won't react to because "paying less for less" is perfectly logical. Then those minority of customers who actually needed the 2% incremental features could buy them ad-hoc, and end up paying the same price.

Albeit, this means that you now don't have pretty bundles, and are selling features à la carte, which can be hard to manage. OR you make all those customers upgrade to Enterprise, which they'll be pissed about, but still falls into the logical "paying more for more" optics.

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