Postman Price Hikes Push Users to Open-Source Alternatives
Recent pricing changes at API platform Postman are reportedly frustrating small development teams. The increases are driving interest toward free and open-source alternatives like Requestly for API testing. This reflects a persistent tension in the developer tools market between monetization and the community's preference for accessible, open platforms.
- Effective March 1, 2026, Postman's free tier will be restricted to a single user per team, a significant change from its previous policy which allowed small teams to collaborate. This move forces teams of two or more to upgrade to a paid plan, such as the new "Team" plan, to continue collaborating. - The company was co-founded in Bangalore by Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti, and Abhijit Kane. It began as a free Chrome extension Asthana built as a side project in 2012 to solve his own API testing frustrations while working at Yahoo Bangalore. - The extension grew organically to 500,000 users without marketing, leading the founders to formally launch the company in 2014. Now headquartered in San Francisco with a major office still in Bangalore, Postman was valued at $5.6 billion after its $225 million Series D funding round in 2021. - The pricing changes are part of a broader simplification of Postman's packaging, introducing new "Solo" and "Team" plans while consolidating complex add-ons for features like the Postbot AI assistant and low-code "Flows" automation. - In response to the new one-user limit on the free plan, developers are exploring alternatives like Apidog, which offers a free tier for up to four users. Other popular open-source options include Insomnia, Bruno, and Hoppscotch (formerly Postwoman). - While mentioned as an alternative, Requestly is often positioned as a complementary tool to Postman. Requestly specializes in intercepting and modifying live browser traffic for frontend and QA debugging, a function Postman does not perform.
