I used Postman for years. It was the first thing I installed on every new laptop, the default answer to "how do I test this endpoint," and for a long time it was genuinely good at that job.

Then Postman killed free teams.

That wasn't what made me leave, but it did make me look at my setup again.

I realised something weird, why does testing an API running on my own machine require a cloud account?

What started bothering me