Announcing the new lightweight Postman API Client and sunsetting Scratch Pad

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade. Today, cloud technology is the norm for small and large organizations to deploy software. As a result, the flexibility and elasticity of SaaS software with low-maintenance cost is the preferred way for businesses to buy applications. More recently, generative AI is rapidly becoming the next evolutionary leap in the interaction between computing and humans.

Postman is also evolving to keep pace with these trends, and we’re continuously working to power the next generation of capabilities for our products. Postman started as a tiny Chrome extension to send API calls. Developers love the simplicity of the API client over writing code or making curl calls. However, as we added more capabilities to the Postman API Platform, we saw that the Postman UI became confusing for beginners. So, last month, we launched a simplified baseline workspace experience in response to feedback we heard from a section of our users who just want a simple API client. I wrote about how our users and customers find value in my earlier blog post.

The second problem we saw with the evolution of Postman was the split between the capabilities we provide as part of our cloud-based services vs. the capabilities we provide locally.

Every month, there are hundreds of thousands of users who sign up with an account on Postman and enjoy the full set of capabilities that we offer. Thousands of companies buy Postman for our team-collaboration features as well as our Enterprise capabilities—all powered by the cloud. So far, we have continued to maintain offline collections through the Scratch Pad and collections through cloud-powered workspaces.

However, maintaining two separate architectures—one with the Scratch Pad and the other with workspaces—for the same set of features has meant that we spend 2x-4x the amount of time in developing or improving the product. In some cases, with feature requests like autosaving requests, the technical implications are even bigger.

As we added support for new protocols like GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSockets, this problem became harder. Building these new clients and allowing for a full-lifecycle workflow through collections in two separate architectures was increasingly just not feasible.

With our recently introduced capabilities—like public workspaces and universal search, Postman Live Collections (March 15), Postman Flows (March 22), and now Postbot and soon-to-be-released autosave—we’ve realized that it is now time to announce the end for offline capabilities built with the Scratch Pad mode. Starting May 15, 2023, Scratch Pad mode will no longer be available in the latest version of the Postman app for new downloads.

In place of the Scratch Pad, we are excited to launch a brand-new lightweight API client that is designed for single users who just want to make quick API calls through the Postman UI. It supports HTTP as well as our newest UIs for GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSocket. The API client maintains a history of API calls so you can go back to the requests you use often.

For sharing and collaborating with your coworkers, we recommend workspaces and one of our paid plans that come with robust features. Of course, you can get started with workspaces for up to three users for free.

For users currently using the Scratch Pad mode, it will continue working in deprecated mode until September 15, 2023. We recommend migrating to workspaces through our migration tool, which enables you to pick up right where you left off with your collections, environments, and history. Simply sign in to Postman from the Scratch Pad, select the Settings icon in the header, and click Settings. Next, select the Data tab, followed by Migrate Data:

To complete the migration, select the workspace where you want to migrate your data and select Move Data:

We know this is a change for many users, and we’re here to help. Feel free to email us with questions at [email protected]. You can also read the Learning Center documentation for more information about migrating to workspaces.

Over the past few months, this focus and clear separation has allowed us to deliver new capabilities at a rapid pace, whether it is solving for about 150 GitHub issues, performance improvements, and our new VS Code extension that we are announcing today, as well.

That’s not all. As we’ve introduced new features for end users, we have also invested in ensuring that your data is secure and safe. We have launched secret scanning, SCIM, SSO, and a whole bunch of other security-focused capabilities to ensure that companies can deploy Postman Enterprise with confidence.

Postman is home to more than 25 million developers to build and use APIs. With this change, we believe we will be serving our different segments better in the ways they have grown to love Postman. Thank you for your support!