from Hacker News

Insomnia REST client now requires an account

by mmillin on 9/27/23, 7:39 PM with 157 comments

  • by helloanoop on 9/28/23, 11:50 AM

    Try Bruno - https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

    - Free and Opensource IDE for exploring and testing APIs

    - It is lightweight with MIT license

    - Bruno stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem

    - Use git for collaboration

    - No cloud sync. Fully offline.

    PS: I am the creator of this project

  • by altairprime on 9/27/23, 8:24 PM

    This is the first I’ve ever heard of Insomnia. Here’s missing context that a blog post about this could have included, to save everyone paging through yet another GitHub issue FP.

    Insomnia 8.0.0-rc1 was released today: https://insomnia.rest/changelog

    The business that ships this codebase is migrating all instances from cloud-optional to cloud-required:

    > The challenge is that we cannot continue to offer a great product with all these capabilities while working on an abstraction layer that supports two different storage backends for all data in Insomnia, adds too much complexity to the whole product.

    Existing non-cloud users who wish to continue operating without the cloud will need to downgrade to 2023.5.8 to continue accessing their data:

    https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/releases/tag/core%402023.5....

    HN user ‘RamblingCTO’ (see below) is the author of the GitHub issue.

  • by wackycat on 9/28/23, 1:22 AM

    Literally just ruined my day. Needed to run one quick query that I had saved and opened insomnia to that stupid login screen and empty scratch pad. Even for folks who had automatic updates on, this should have come with some kind of warning. So poorly handled. Boo.

  • by relium on 9/28/23, 6:49 PM

    This sucks beyond belief. The whole reason I moved to Insomnia from Postman was because Postman uploaded all of our APIs and credentials to their server without asking. I have clients that demand privacy - we can't even discuss the existence of their APIs outside the company.

  • by tornato7 on 9/28/23, 6:14 AM

    Another app that's trying to do too much. All I want is a basic GUI for curl with some organization and templating. I ditched Postman because they decided to go all enterprise subscription model on us, apparently I'll have to ditch Insomnia too. What a shame.

  • by j_crick on 9/28/23, 7:24 PM

    - Market yourself up as a Postman alternative

    - Work for some time

    - Do the same shit as Postman

    - ...

    - Profit? Really?

    I don’t know even. Why does it have to be the same story all the time? It’s become so tiring.

  • by meekins on 9/28/23, 6:31 AM

    This is very disappointing after migrating to Insomnia from Postman a couple of months ago. I did the migration even when my company provides Postman licenses for the employees because I don't need nor want the "collaboration" features, cloud sync (I have my backups covered, thanks) nor the telemetry.

    Can anyone recommend an open source API client that is content being just an API client?

  • by addicted on 9/28/23, 2:07 AM

    Lol we were literally working on approving Insomnia for company wide use to completely replace Postman only because it didn’t need an account.

    I guess we can kiss Insomnia goodbye as an option now.

  • by joeyhage on 9/27/23, 9:10 PM

    Restfox [1] has a similar UI to insomnia and works well. Not affiliated with Restfox

    [1] https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox

  • by danfarrelly on 9/27/23, 8:56 PM

    Our team has just started to use this a bit more and I really liked the .insomnia dir in our projects. This is pretty sad as we've seen this path with Postman - I ~~thought~~ hoped that since Kong had plenty of other viable revenue streams that Insomnia would stay out of this nonsense. Disappointing.

  • by salawat on 9/28/23, 6:23 PM

    Had to laugh my ass off the first time I heard a Postman ad.

    I was like, are you serious? An API testing tool being marketed to people for production purposes?

    The moment they started cutting local state out of postman and pushing business customers to use their cloud offering, I was like, "Ah hah hah, nope".

  • by RamblingCTO on 9/27/23, 7:44 PM

    I thought about posting this half an hour ago but instead chose violence on their GitHub. Time to look into alternatives. I still can't comprehend this move. Seems Postman did well after they pulled this stunt so Kong does it as well.

  • by mead5432 on 9/27/23, 10:43 PM

    Thoughtworks Technology Radar has Insomnia as a "Trial" in the issue that came out today because of Postman pushing for more things to live on their servers.

    While not quite the same, still feels like awkward timing.

    https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/tools/summary/insomnia

    *edited to add a link

  • by nde on 9/27/23, 7:59 PM

    Discussion going on in https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577. Unlikely to change anything, though. Time to look at alternatives.

  • by Aeolun on 9/28/23, 7:19 AM

    I just don't have the energy to find a new client and build up my collection again... How do I know that a random product won't sabotage my future use at some point in time? Do I really have to build everything myself to be safe?

  • by markcollin on 9/28/23, 7:20 PM

    Both popular alternatives - insomnia and Thunder client have pulled the rug

    Had to migrate away from Thunder client once they announced their pricing and stopping freemium.

    I have moved to bruno and its pretty refreshing to use a simple tool without the cloud bloat

  • by heh on 9/27/23, 9:02 PM

    That's amazingly terrible, I get the business case but this is the sort of thing you don't roll out in an automatic update....and you talk to your customers and stakeholders about first. Just wow.

  • by stringtoint on 9/27/23, 9:05 PM

    Curious to know what advantages Insomnia has/had over Postman beyond being MIT licensed.

    Postman's initial startup time could be a bit faster but other than this I'm not missing much (yet). I used it for years occasionally before finally creating an account not so long to sync my requests across devices.

    BTW: Jetbrains IDEs like WebStorm also have an integrated HTTP client.

  • by fosk on 9/28/23, 12:46 AM

    Marco here, CTO at Kong (the parent company of Insomnia). You will see some of my replies in the GitHub issue where this conversation is taking place.

    I want to clarify a couple of things:

    1) Insomnia can still be used locally in any version prior to this one. The data is there, and can be used.

    2) Insomnia still has a local-only mode (Scratch Pad) that doesn't require any account, that anybody can use. A collection can be imported into Scratch Pad for API debugging purposes.

    3) There is an onboarding step that clearly states what's going to happen and that allows the user to export the data. We also don't migrate any data until an account is created.

    4) Data is not migrated in the cloud when collaborating with Git Sync, which is a capability that allows us to use Git as the source of truth. It is also not migrated without creating an account.

    5) When migrating to the cloud, data is fully end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). That is the case for free accounts as well, not only premium plans.

    6) Any organization that is serious about security can get in touch with Kong to pass the security compliance assessment and use the cloud like they most likely do with any other vendor.

    7) We will even further improve clarity with a new minor version (8.1) that makes all of the above more clear (how to export/import etc).

    What's not seen in that conversation, is the large number of users that wanted a product that allowed them to collaborate better, without losing their data, and sync that data securely across multiple clients. Which is why we tried to strike a balance between convenience and feature-richness (cloud) but still provide a local option for other users (Scratch Pad).

    I can assure you that we didn't wake up one day and choose violence :) Ultimately, I am also perfectly aware that we can't make everybody happy.

  • by quic5 on 9/27/23, 9:19 PM

    It’s still MIT licensed right? Seems like we need a Vscodium for Insomnia

  • by SideburnsOfDoom on 9/27/23, 8:56 PM

    It was a month or so that I heared of Insomnia, when we were looking for easier alternatives to Postman, which is much further down the VC-funded, "gotta monetise those users" trajectory.

    But they're trying to catch up, maybe?

  • by markcollin on 9/28/23, 7:23 PM

    lol.. here we are again discussing postman alternatives.. this looks like a cycle

    open-source a tool

    build userbase

    VC funding

    rugpull

    repeat

  • by PH95VuimJjqBqy on 9/27/23, 8:14 PM

    what alternatives exist?

    I literally just switched to insomnia due to postman doing this so I'm a bit stuck now. Do I go back to fiddler?

  • by tomaszs on 9/28/23, 8:35 PM

    According to the discussion and brief browsing of code changes I don't see any intention or proof it's for promoting the cloud solution. The title is not justified. The report was made 13h ago after beta versions released. There's no response yet.

    update : found response here: https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/6577#issuecomment-17...

    I understand it's intentional

  • by dochne on 9/27/23, 9:12 PM

    My understanding is that Postman unfortunately pulled the same thing lately, so that's unfortunately a no-go for you.

    I've previously had good experiences with Paw (now RapidAPI) - https://paw.cloud/, but given that they are closed source and have started giving away the software rather than charging for it, I'm not filled with optimism they won't do a similar rug pull.

  • by weinzierl on 9/28/23, 10:59 AM

    Can someone please explain what the core issue is here? The Github issue says "needing an account" but the Kong CEO says below that

    "2) Insomnia still has a local-only mode (Scratch Pad) that doesn't require any account, that anybody can use. A collection can be imported into Scratch Pad for API debugging purposes."

    So, if I don't need or want any sharing and keep my collections in the file system, can I still use it without ever creating an account or not?

  • by adl on 9/29/23, 8:13 AM

    Jetbrains has a pretty cool HTTP/REST client: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-cli.html

    The 'UI' (which is really an editor/syntax highlighting for the .http files) version I believe is a paid feature on the IDEs, but the CLI one I believe you don't need to pay to use it.

  • by capableweb on 9/28/23, 7:16 PM

    AFAIK, there has been no official response so for all we know, this could be a bug, not intended behavior?

    Seems it has (accidentally) at least happen once before (https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/issues/5559) so probably worth switching to a different client regardless if this time was on purpose or not.

  • by markcollin on 9/28/23, 7:23 PM

    lol.. here we are again discussing postman alternatives.. this looks like a cycle

    open-source a tool

    build userbase

    VC funding

    rugpull

    repeat

  • by cloverr20 on 9/28/23, 6:44 PM

    If you are using vim, you could try this one https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client. I have been using it for some time and it has worked well. Use in your local file system, integrates well with vim but I had to fork it since it didn't had a timeout setting.

  • by malablaster on 10/6/23, 11:26 AM

    Taking away my data until I register is really shameful and on principle I won't use this app anymore.

  • by jayFellows on 10/10/23, 12:43 AM

  • by adocomplete on 9/28/23, 5:30 PM

    Yikes. That is terrible if true and a great way to kill your product.

  • by ushakov on 9/28/23, 10:36 PM

    For automated testing, you should give Step CI (https://github.com/stepci/stepci) a try

    Ps. I helped build it

  • by harrytwigg on 10/9/23, 10:41 AM

    I wasn't happy with the existing tools a whole ago, so I made my own called APITeam. It's similar to postman or insomnia but supports load testing out of the box

  • by ReptileMan on 9/28/23, 6:04 PM

    So we are once again in the - please give alternatives. No clouds, no syncs, no other bullsit ... Postman is dead, insomnia seemed like good alternative.

  • by hirstys on 9/28/23, 12:14 PM

  • by mailund on 9/29/23, 8:16 AM

    Thanks for the heads up, instant uninstall.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 9/28/23, 2:13 AM

    Tell HN:

  • by fosk on 9/28/23, 11:34 PM

    So. Much. Noise.

    An update on Insomnia 8.x here:

    * Insomnia can be used locally-only with Scratch Pad.

    * Insomnia can be used with an account without sharing any data using Git Sync (the data is in your Git repository, wherever that is hosted).

    * Insomnia can be used with an account and without Git Sync in a fully end-to-end encrypted way (E2EE). Nobody can read your data.

    * Insomnia stores your account information in Auth0, which is ISO27001, SOC 2 Type II, ISO27018, HIPAA BAA, Gold CSA STAR, PCI and GDPR compliant.

    * The data is not automatically migrated anywhere unless an account is created, as clearly explained in the onboarding that users have to approve in order to get access to the product.

    * Insomnia can be used for Free with an account.

    Unlike Postman, we are fully E2EE on every plan, local Scratch Pad is still there, Git is always an option when having an account.

    On top of this, we have shipped today 100s of features for real time collaboration, unlimited collaborators in the Free plan when working on one project, organizations, RBAC, EE SSO, multi-client support for everyone, and so on [1]

    Finally, here is a video that shows how to use Insomnia locally: https://www.loom.com/share/de7af6f9e06b4452a799a033604f9270?...

    Trying to put some clarity in the noise. If you find any of these statements which is factually incorrect, please point them out.

    [1] - https://konghq.com/blog/product-releases/insomnia-8-0