The API client microcosm of the VC shit economy

But it's still somehow worth billions of dollars

During my second ever job, I was working for a serious client. The client was a bank. One day I opened Postman and found myself locked out behind an account screen, with a tiny, easy-to-miss link to skip it. I eventually got my stuff back, but the experience stuck with me.

It was the first time a tool I used professionally had pulled something like this, but it wouldn’t be the last. I have 2 “fell for it again” awards, and the second stung more because it was from an open-source project.

This article follows API clients: Postman, Insomnia, Insomnium and Bruno, in roughly the order I came across them, and explains why I eventually decided to deenshittify one of them for my own use. That project is restless (site), an independent, offline-first fork of Insomnia inspired by Insomnium. Obviously, I have a stake in how this story ends, so keep that in mind while reading.

Also, apologies in advance for how much Hacker News is going to feature in this post. I’m a chronic HN browser. Hopefully some of you can relate. You know, the alone coffee break, or that first coffee in the morning after checking your emails and inevitably ending up on HN.

I also further apologize for the upcoming silly chapter names, the first one of which should be read like a 70s mecha anime title.

In March 2020, someone asked the Postman community how to skip account creation. The answer was a “Skip signing in” link. This is the screenshot posted in reply, arrow included:

The way out in March 2020. The red box and arrow are from the original reply (by Postman community user Kurmavatar).

That was a bit of a wake-up call. This was supposed to be a modern industry-standard tool, yet it was already moving in a direction that didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t like the idea of handing over my data, let alone my client’s, to a service that could potentially lock me out of it whenever it wanted. And eventually, that’s exactly what would have happened to me had I not jumped ship.

In January 2021, version 8 left some users staring at “Unable to load data as you’re offline”. In a related issue, a Postman representative asked a user whether their old collections were “in the scratch pad view”.

An API client refusing to show your data because you’re offline. Reported in January 2021 (by GitHub user qqk1011).

Then came the end of the Scratch Pad, at the time Postman’s remaining offline mode.

On May 14, 2023, Postman’s CEO announced its retirement. His explanation was that maintaining both the Scratch Pad and cloud workspaces meant “2x-4x the amount of time” spent on development. So it was time to “announce the end for offline capabilities”.

The replacement still stores data locally, according to Postman, but collections and environments require signing in. And if you wanted to recover your old data, “You must migrate your data to a Postman account”.

A few months later, in October 2023, a Tell HN post with 365 points described what happened when its author declined to create an account: “it wiped all my collections and everything else”.

It is worth looking at where Postman was financially around this time. It started, in its CEO’s words, as “a tiny Chrome extension to send API calls”. In June 2020, it raised $150M at a $2B valuation. In August 2021, it closed another round of "$225 million that values the company at $5.6 billion".

Bruno’s creator, Anoop M D, included Postman in a table in his long-term vision thread, which Bruno’s README links to. His figures were "$434M, $5.6B Valuation". Asked about it on HN, he replied: “But yes $5.6b is nuts.”

Postman has its own side of the story. During the AWS outage in October 2025, Postman went down for people who thought they were using it locally. The Hacker News discussion reached 537 points. Someone introducing himself as Postman’s founder joined the discussion and explained that the decision to build sign-in and cloud features was “not due to a VC-led conspiracy”. Customers had asked for those features, he said, and an offline client for sending requests still exists.

And then there’s the latest mess: Just last week as of the writing of this post, a GitHub issue reports that opening Postman 12.33.4 on macOS installed plugins into Claude Code and Codex, modified their configurations and attempted to approve its own startup hook.

The Hacker News thread has almost 1,500 points, with a title claiming Postman “attempts to share all API data”. There’s an important distinction here: the issue itself explicitly says “it does not claim to establish data exfiltration”.

Postman’s head of product responded through a PR agency. As paraphrased by RuntimeWire, Postman bundles its CLI and plugins to make setup easier, plans to make the opt-in clearer for existing users, and is reviewing the hook behavior.

I couldn’t find a fix or a date for one.

Also, just as a sidenote, using GitHub for a closed-source project always felt wrong to me, it feels inherently misleading. I don’t know.

I discovered Insomnia because people were complaining about Postman. I switched over and was happy with it. I used it through COVID and for quite a while afterwards, until one day it locked me out of my stuff too.

Most of my data was backed up, thankfully, but I still had to redo a lot of requests because I refused to create an account. It was terrible, especially given what else was going on in my life at the time. Not to show my age again but I actually lost sleep over it.

This happened on September 27, 2023, when Insomnia 8.0 shipped and put projects behind an account.

Kong had acquired Insomnia in 2019. At the time, Insomnia had grown from a Chrome web app into a desktop application. Kong said “we will be maintaining Insomnia as an open source project” and assured users that the deal “will not lead to disruption for existing Insomnia users”.

Disruption did indeed occur to me and ostensibly many, many others.

Opening HN I found a thread titled “Insomnia REST client now requires an account” on the front page. (Another thread, “Insomnia’s update locks out prev user data, forces account creation w/o warning”, was merged into it.)

One commenter described it as “the sort of thing you don’t roll out in an automatic update”. Another suggested “we need a Vscodium for Insomnia”. The first reply was simply “Insomnium?” (foreshadowing). Someone else suggested “Bruno maybe?”.

The onboarding screen, as posted by Kong’s CTO (GitHub user subnetmarco) during the backlash.

Kong’s CTO joined the discussion and tried to explain what was happening. He pointed out that older versions still worked locally, that the Scratch Pad didn’t require an account, and that an onboarding step explained the changes and offered an export. He also said nothing was migrated until you created an account.

On GitHub, he gave three reasons for the change: collaboration required cloud infrastructure, maintaining two storage backends was becoming a burden, and “we need a viable business”.

He also acknowledged that “this was an oversight” when it came to explaining how users could export their data.

Kong did fix some of the problems within days. On October 16, it brought back local projects in version 8.3, describing their removal as “a faulty assumption”.

There was still a catch: “You will need an account with Local Vault”. At least the account could be free.

To me and many others, the damage was done. And trust can’t be so easily regained in my opinion. Especially with all the money involved that influences the incentive structure. It’s hard to see this as an honest mistake.

Back to that HN discussion. Somewhere in the comments was a one-word suggestion: Insomnium?

I downloaded it immediately and have been using it ever since. It’s still installed on my Windows PC, and I still use it regularly.

Insomnium was a fork of Insomnia 2023.5.8, “the last commit before compulsory account login was introduced”. The login and tracking were removed.

Its author announced it on Hacker News on September 29, 2023, where it got 204 points. When someone asked whether he planned to maintain it, he answered “Yes! I plan to maintain it long-term!”.

In July 2024, the repository was archived with a note saying it was “no longer being actively maintained”. The note pointed to a related project but didn’t name it.

To be fair, Insomnium was essentially a snapshot of one particular Insomnia version, with the account requirements removed, some privacy improvements and a few tweaks for the LLMs that were starting to become popular. It wasn’t a completely independent application with its own development direction.

Eventually, I wanted to fork it myself and bring its dependencies up to date. The main concern was security, particularly Electron, but also the Node/React/Vite ecosystem around it. The webslop, if you will. Running an old Electron application with a mountain of known vulnerabilities that for a lot of cases has to be connected to the internet to function is not something I particularly enjoy nor recommend. And as any webdev would know, that’s not really an exaggeration: running npm audit today on Insomnium’s September 2023 lockfile, which pins Electron 25.2.0, reports 127 vulnerabilities, 16 of them critical and 77 high.

But when I went looking for the original repository, it was gone.

I don’t know what happened to it. I couldn’t find anyone explaining its disappearance either.

The only clue I found was the description of a repository recreated under the same name on November 3, 2026, by a new organization that also calls itself ArchGPT. As far as I remember, it’s the same creator, but I can’t prove that. The description reads “restored repo after accidental deletion in an automated workflow”.

It doesn’t mention an AI agent, although its single commit is authored by “archgpt-agent-0”. The repository contains a single ZIP file, which I haven’t opened and would treat as untrusted.

Thankfully, the Internet Archive still has a copy of the original source from October 2023.

Still, losing access to the original repository felt strangely bad. Almost like finding out that some obscure piece of software had become “lost media”. It’s probably irrational, considering the number of forks, but that’s how it felt. Apparently someone has been running a continuation, yokomohoyo/insomnium, since June 2026, and its README says it’s actively maintained. I haven’t tried it yet.

One personal takeaway: a repository disappearing like this is another reason nobody should give AI agents unrestricted control over their machines, or accounts. No matter how convenient it might be.

I tried Bruno in late September 2023, around the time of this Hacker News thread.

It had telemetry enabled by default, which bothered me, particularly given the promises being made around privacy and offline use. I also had my gripes with Electronslop, like the commenters there, although I realize that’s a bit hypocritical when Insomnia itself is pretty terribly bloated. If I had the time to redo restless in something like Rust, I would.

I kept Bruno installed, but never felt like using it.

Bruno was created by Anoop M D and open-sourced under the MIT license in October 2022. It was also posted to Hacker News that month.

One of its main selling points is that collections are stored as ordinary files, whic