Celebrating 20 Million Postman Users

Today, I’m excited to announce an incredible milestone: Postman now has more than 20 million users worldwide.

When I first posted on Stack Overflow about my homegrown tool back in 2012, I never imagined that tens of millions of developers and builders around the globe would someday use Postman to harness the full potential of APIs. What started as a simple API client has grown into a comprehensive platform supporting the API lifecycle from design to production.

We got here together—so, thank you

I want to extend a huge thank you to the developer community for putting our hard work to use and inspiring us to always improve. You’re the reason we continuously optimize the API platform, for which we were a top rank in multiple categories of G2’s Best Software Awards for 2022 and named a Visionary in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.

Thank you also to the more than 500,000 organizations using Postman today. With 98% of the Fortune 500 relying on our API platform, more and more industry leaders—like Paylocity, Ping Identity, and Twitter—are sharing their stories of how and why they leverage Postman’s many features.

And, more and more amazing companies are sharing their work on what’s become the world’s largest hub for public APIs, the Postman Public API Network. Today, anyone can check out public workspaces by Microsoft, PayPal, Stripe, Meta, Intel, and Oracle to explore some of the most powerful APIs around.

Our company now has more than 500 Postmanauts dotted around the world map. Each Postmanaut is dedicating their authentic skills to support the developer community in building, sharing, discovering, and collaborating on all things API. Thank you to every member of the Postman team: you play a pivotal role in helping us win together.

Bringing the API-first world to life

The world is using more software than ever. And since every piece of software built today either uses an API or is an API, industry leaders are realizing the benefits of an API-first world.

But the API management category has been stuck in a code-first mentality that focuses more on gateways and less on delivering tools for users to harness APIs to their fullest. We have made a concerted effort to flip this approach on its head and pursue our vision for an API-first world.

In that vision, developers build faster and better software. This is possible because seamless collaboration is enabled at every level of the API lifecycle, and APIs are treated as a primary building block rather than an afterthought. In the API-first world:

• APIs are considered a #1 priority
• APIs are easily consumable
• APIs are easily discoverable

Postman is here to empower the rising number of API-first companies embracing this reality. These companies use APIs as the building blocks of their software strategy, conceptualizing and building apps as an interconnection of internal and external services through APIs.

Across all industries, developers are spending more and more time working with APIs. In the 2021 State of the API Report, 49% of respondents said that more than half of their organization’s development effort is spent on APIs—nearly a 10 percentage point increase from the previous year. Plus, 67% of respondents ranked themselves as a five or higher in terms of embracing an API-first philosophy.

As a result, API security has become a hot topic and APIs are being addressed as a top priority. We’re seeing a lot of expansion in the types of people working hands-on with APIs: quality engineers, DevOps, and site reliability engineers. And there are more and more new roles consuming APIs: product managers, data scientists, citizen developers, ops, and other personas.

This is all happening in parallel with the expanding tech landscape. Existing technologies are changing and maturing—with new approaches to crypto and Web3 (and more!) being adopted, debated, and normalized. This 20 million user milestone shows that Postman remains aligned with our customers and their evolving business needs amidst rapid change.

Supporting the world’s need for more builders

Software is everywhere. APIs are everywhere. But only 1% of computer users can actually develop software. Postman wants to change that.

We want to help anyone feel empowered to build software and be a more active participant in our modern society and economy. We want to help create 100 million connected builders.

Whether it’s our foundational collaborative workspaces or our recent no-code Postman Flows (now in beta, making the developer’s world accessible to non-developers), Postman is all about discovering ways to help our growing community build and lead the API-first world.

We are constantly seeking out how we can educate, equip, and inspire the next generation of engineering talent. And we want to make our products easily accessible to anyone, anywhere—on mobile, desktop, and web without any constraints.

Finally, with public collaboration in the Postman Public API Network being free for both publishers and consumers, I believe that the intersection of ideas spanning so many types of accessible APIs will result in more and more cool things for the web.

10 ways we’re working for the future

Here are just 10 of the many things on the Postman roadmap meant to support the world’s growing number of builders:

• New Postman API Platform: Read how the latest version of Postman is redefining API management for the API-first world here.
• Increased protocol support: Read about our added support for gRPC, WebSockets, and Socket.io.
• New collaboration features: Read about our ongoing feature releases in support of greater, seamless collaboration here.
• New integrations: Read about our ongoing integrations to provide comprehensive tooling here.
• Postman Open Technologies: Read how Postman Open Technologies is nurturing open source specifications, standards, tooling, and data that support the global API community across companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies here.
• Postman Student Programs: Read how Postman Student Programs promote API literacy amongst students and educators around the world here.
• API Lab at BITS Pilani: Read about Postman’s API Lab at BITS Pilani in India that’s being built to help fuel API-first education and innovation here.
• Postman books: Read the first Postman graphic novel, The API-First World, and get a sneak peek of our upcoming book, The API-First Transformation, here.
• Postman Enterprise: Read how we’re building features for organizations to deploy Postman at scale with enterprise-class support, security, reliability, and uptime here.
• Community-driven product updates: Read how our product is built with community input, and learn how you can give us feedback here.

Still much more ahead

There is always more to discover and create.

To our 20 million users: we will continue to keep you close to our process. Your feedback guides us as we improve the Postman API Platform. So whether you’re an enterprise business with a team of thousands, or a solo developer operating out of your room (like I was when this whole thing began!), we’re here to support your API adventures.

What started as a journey of one just trying to make my life and the lives of other developers easier by sharing a helpful tool, has turned into a journey of 20 million. I’m grateful you’ve joined us.

And on behalf of all of us here at Postman, I promise we’ll keep rising to the challenge to build a better-connected world through APIs.