I don’t get the appeal of Postman. Collections are great but I’ve always preferred plain old curl.
Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
61–70 of 124 posts
Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#62Try as they might, I don't think Postman will ever be able to justify that $5.6bn valuation...
Now they are forcing to register to their platform to continue using the collections for free. So most of the users will have to enter their data, or just leave the product (difficult, there's not that much alternative)
I much prefer the HTTP client that comes with IntelliJ, to be frank.
Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an absolutely crazy valuation for the product / industry. Ultimately they're competing with free & good enough. What's their moat?
> What's their moat? I find this question really annoying. Almost all tech companies have no moat except for maybe brand and network moat which postman also kinda has. What's Apple's moat? Or Google's?
Google: chrome is free and makes up 62.85% of browsers and android makes up 70.89% of all mobile operating system. Both drive users to google. Google ads is still one of the easiest tools for monetizing websites and advertising with a large market. Even if Newcomers bridge the massive technical gap, they won't have the same size of market so they aren't going to be as attractive unless they niche down significantly.
Apple has a strong luxury brand, higher quality, a large valuable market with a strong app community. They have a similar insulation to external players. Macbooks also tend to be popular in development communities due to its unix based os and strong support, which can be a strong alternative to a linux os for companies, but has been watered down with Windows push to support WSL2.
Postman doesn't have a moat. They don't have a strong marketplace where they can profit of exchanges. They don't have a significantly more advanced tool. it can be easily replaced by any user with an equivalent product with no real loss.
Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#64Try as they might, I don't think Postman will ever be able to justify that $5.6bn valuation...
Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? When I was on onboarding at a job my pair started teaching me postman, which ended with me teaching them curl and them dropping postman. If you need to share queries, put them in version control!
I like that they let me run same set of APIs against different environments.
Also I can stitch together different APIs by taking response from one API and pass it as request to other APIs. For instance I invoke login API, grab session ID from the response and pass it to other APIs which are behind login.
Of course one could do all of this in curl but it’ll be cumbersome. And yes, if all you want to do is invoke a single API then Postman is definitely an overkill.
Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just because they have money. It will take billions of dollars and multiple years for other companies to reach that but I don't see any moat except if money is the moat. Same with postman. Right now they are so much ahead in features that it would take multiple years for other company to match it.
I think its more than money and time. Getting supply chains right (both hardware and software) is really hard at scale. Additionally there’s network effects of their proprietary ecosystem that thousands of developers and millions of users have invested in. Thats very very sticky. Unless Apple fucks up majorly I don’t see that changing.
> Unless Apple fucks up majorly I don’t see that changing.
I agree 100%. I just said the same is true for postman that it is hard for some other company to replace it.
Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I haven't used Postman since Insomnia came out. What's keeping you with Postman?
Isn't Insomnia the same? The parent company (KongHQ) is also backed by VCs @ 1.2B valuation. Whats the difference/better?
But this isn't their main product. As it should be ideally.
Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#67Try as they might, I don't think Postman will ever be able to justify that $5.6bn valuation...
They don't have to. They just need enough time and believe for the investors to dump it on retail (IPO) or get bought-out by another company.
Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an absolutely crazy valuation for the product / industry. Ultimately they're competing with free & good enough. What's their moat?
> What's their moat? I find this question really annoying. Almost all tech companies have no moat except for maybe brand and network moat which postman also kinda has. What's Apple's moat? Or Google's?
Apple probably has half a dozen layers of moats one of which is their M line of processors.
Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#69Re: Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
postman was essentially built as a easy GUI version of curl. Once it went the VC route it kinda jumped the shark.
Agreed. Postman is a classic victim of "Enshittification" to try to recoup the VC money. I prefer this VS Code plugin for the very simple stuff https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... I'm sure there's a gap for a "better postman" that's more complex that that, but a lot less encrusted than postman. However IMHO, the more complex scripted testing is better done in your main dev language Source:…
https://insomnia.rest/download
Like Postman, without all the bullshit. Which is to say, like a few-versions-ago Postman.