Postman is the company and the tool that, more than any other, defined the API developer experience over the last decade — and I have a particularly close relationship to its story, having served as its Chief Evangelist. Postman started as a simple HTTP client, a Chrome extension that let developers make API requests and see the responses, and it grew into the dominant platform for working with APIs across the entire lifecycle. The Postman story is the story of how the API client moved from the periphery to the center of API work, how the collection became a fundamental unit of API representation, and how a developer tool became collaboration infrastructure for millions. Watching and participating in Postman’s evolution taught me an enormous amount about where the real center of gravity in API operations actually lies — on the consuming side, in the client, where developers actually do their work.
The collection is Postman’s most important contribution, and understanding it is understanding why Postman mattered. A Postman collection is a portable, executable bundle of API requests, complete with the environmental context needed to run them. I came to describe the collection as a single, quantifiable, shareable, executable unit of representation for any digital capability — and I mean each of those words precisely. The collection is quantifiable (you can count and measure it), shareable (you can hand it to someone and they can run it), and executable (it runs against the API, it doesn’t just describe it). This is what distinguishes a collection from an OpenAPI definition. I framed OpenAPI as the static truth of what an API can do, and Postman collections as the real-world derivatives of that truth — reflecting how developers actually apply the API, with environments, auth, examples, and sequencing baked in. The collection became, for a huge amount of practical API work, the more meaningful artifact, because it captures what people are actually doing rather than just what’s theoretically possible.
The “Run in Postman” button was a genuinely clever innovation that accelerated Postman’s spread, and it’s a small thing that did enormous work. I wrote about the embeddable Run in Postman button in 2016 — the button that let a developer go from reading about an API to executing a real call against it in minutes, with the collection carrying everything they needed. This collapsed onboarding friction dramatically and made Postman ubiquitous: providers embedded the button in their documentation, and developers who clicked it landed in Postman with a working collection. The button turned Postman into the default destination for trying an API, and that default position was a huge driver of its growth. By the time Atlassian and Cloudflare and countless others were shipping Run in Postman buttons by default, Postman had become woven into how the industry distributed and onboarded APIs.
Postman’s growth from client to platform is the arc that I found most significant, and I made a bold prediction about it. I wrote in 2021 that Postman would do for APIs what GitHub did for open source — become the platform where the work happens, the collaboration layer, the network where APIs are discovered and shared. Postman expanded from a simple request tool to service dozens of stops along the API lifecycle: definitions, versioning, environments, testing, mocking, documentation, monitoring, governance, collaboration through workspaces, and discovery through the public API network. The twenty problems Postman was solving for developers, which I catalogued in 2022, reflected how comprehensively the platform had grown to address the entire API workflow. The Postman API Network became a major discovery surface, the workspaces became collaboration infrastructure, and the platform became, for a period, the place where it looked like the entire API lifecycle might consolidate. Postman proved that the API client could become the center of gravity for API work.
My joining Postman as Chief Evangelist in 2019 was a significant moment in my own story and in how I understood Postman’s place. I’d spent years as the independent API Evangelist, and joining Postman meant bringing my evangelism and my API lifecycle thinking into a company that was building the tools to realize a lot of what I’d been advocating for. The years I spent there, including producing the Breaking Changes podcast and doing an enormous amount of collection-based storytelling, deepened my understanding of how developers actually work with APIs and confirmed my conviction that the collection and the client are the underappreciated center of the consuming side. Postman’s business model, which I noted in 2019 was well-aligned with enterprise objectives, reflected a company that had figured out how to build a sustainable business around the developer tool that developers genuinely loved.
The honest, complete picture of Postman includes the great unbundling, which is the latest chapter and a fitting one. As Postman grew into a heavy, cloud-centric, increasingly commercial platform, a wave of specialized alternatives emerged — Bruno, Scalar, and others, often open-source and local-first — pulling functions back out of the monolithic platform. I wrote about the great unbundling of the API client in 2025, and it’s a development I view with genuine appreciation even given my history with Postman, because it reflects a healthy market dynamic. Postman demonstrated what an API platform could be and consolidated the lifecycle in a way that was genuinely valuable; the unbundling that followed is the market correcting toward focus, openness, and local-first control where the consolidated platform had created lock-in and bloat. Both movements are part of the same history: Postman proved the API client could be the center of API work, and the unbundling proved that center could be served in more focused, open ways. The Postman story is, in the end, one of the most important in the modern history of APIs — the tale of how a simple HTTP client became the collaboration platform for the entire lifecycle, how the collection became a fundamental unit of API representation, and how the consuming side of APIs, long overshadowed by the producing side, finally got the recognition and the tooling it deserved. Postman moved the center of gravity in the API world, and the entire industry was shaped by where it landed.
References
- Postman Collections Will Take Your API Productivity To The Next Level
- An Embeddable Run In Postman Button For Your API
- The Postman API Network
- Postman Collection As A Single Quantifiable, Shareable, Executable Unit Of Representation For Any Digital Capability
- I Am Joining Postman As Their Chief Evangelist
- OpenAPI Is The Static Truth And Postman Collections Are Real-World Derivatives Of That Truth
- Postman Will Do For APIs What GitHub Did For Open Source
- Twenty Problems That Postman Is Solving For Developers In 2022
- The Great Unbundling Of The API Client
