Announcing Postman 2023 product and versioning updates…and VS Code extension!

Postman continues to evolve towards our vision of building the API-first world at a rapid pace. We have shipped hundreds of improvements and updates over the last few years—and we have more on the horizon. Support for gRPC, WebSockets, Git integration, public and Partner Workspaces, API Security and Governance, and many more advancements are now available in the Postman API Platform.

We are excited to do even more for the Postman community, which is now over 20 million developers and growing. However, one thing that we have not been good at is clearly defining which features and improvements are important to whom. This is a big challenge as Postman users span the spectrum from beginner developers to testers to product managers to even non-developers who are just getting started with the power of APIs. We keep getting feedback reflecting this broad community: some users feel overwhelmed with our pace, while others feel we are not doing enough.

As we start 2023, I want to share the key benefits that our customers gain from Postman and how we are updating our packaging and simplifying our product to better meet the needs of our customers.

• API client: Postman users are able to work with APIs faster, whether they are REST, SOAP, GraphQL, gRPC, or WebSockets, using the Postman API client. The Postman client has always been free and always will be free for everyone.

• API collaboration: Postman allows teams of up to three to collaborate for free, and for a higher number of users, customers can choose any of our paid plans. Collaborative workspaces allow for a wide variety of use cases between teams, which I wrote about here. Postman’s Private API Network is designed for large organizations to build a central API catalog and is included in our Enterprise plan. Partner Workspaces are designed for organizations to work across company boundaries and are also available in our Enterprise plan.

• API lifecycle automation: Built for experienced developers, quality engineers, security engineers, IT, and DevOps, Postman’s automation capabilities—like the Collection Runner, the Postman CLI, and reporting—allow teams and organizations to automate their API lifecycle steps, from design to production, to ensure that they are shipping high-quality APIs.

• API Governance: Our newest suite of capabilities for larger organizations helps them manage APIs at scale and ensure APIs meet the guidelines each organization has set out. These features are meant primarily for platform engineering teams, API architects, and design teams.

Versioning changes

We will now ship a single release every month for our free and self-serve tier users (Basic and Professional plans) using a monthly versioning scheme. We will be retiring the current major/minor version scheme starting February 15, 2023. While we will ship hotfixes and security patches as required, we believe this new cadence will allow users to understand capabilities at a more measured pace.

For our Enterprise customers, we will continue our existing versioning process.

Simplified product packaging

In upcoming releases of Postman, we will be simplifying the onboarding and the first-user experience. Three key features—collections, environments, and requests—will be the starting point for all users inside workspaces, and we will be removing the rest from the default experience. We see most users starting from here and then graduating to advanced features as they get familiar with the product. Advanced features will still be accessible through product flows or through the sidebar configuration option:

To better align with the value Postman’s test automation offers for professional testers and quality engineers, we will make the following changes effective February 15, 2023, for free customers, and effective March 15, 2023, for new paid plan customers. Existing paid plan customers will see these limits effective upon plan renewal after March 15, 2023 (except Enterprise users, who have unlimited runs per month):

• Local Collection Runner: Runs will be available with Free and Basic plans at 25 runs per month, Professional plan at 250 runs per month, and Enterprise plan at unlimited runs per month
• Cloud-based Collection Runner: Runs will be billed on a consumption basis as part of the monitoring calls entitlement

Limits apply only to local runs via the Collection Runner, not via Newman or Postman CLI.

In addition, online reporting capabilities using the Postman CLI will continue to evolve and will be an area of investment in 2023.

We are also investing in a better offline experience so that users don’t have to use the scratchpad anymore. While the new offline experience will continue to be available for sending requests, we encourage users to switch to workspaces, especially if you rely on business-critical workflows.

Partner Workspace viewers will be free

In September 2022, we launched Partner Workspaces to enable Postman customers to share workspaces with their partners. Each workspace is secure, and if a customer has multiple partners, each partner has their own workspace separate from other partners and their co-development efforts. In addition, we have seen our customers build collections for their partners so that they have the API code, documentation, tests, and mocks that can be updated by both the customer and their partner in real time—making for a truly synchronous experience.

To help our customers work with their partners more effectively, we are making the partner Viewer license free for our Enterprise customers. Partner Viewers can access Partner Workspaces they are invited to and view workspace elements (code, documentation, tests, mocks, etc.). Editors will have the same permissions, including full-scale access to a workspace, and will be charged the full license cost for Postman. The partner Viewer license change will be effective March 15, 2023, but if any Enterprise plan customers would like to take advantage earlier, please contact us.

Upcoming VS Code extension

We have seen the rise of VS Code as the most popular online editor for web developers. To help these developers be closer to their workflows, we will be releasing a VS Code extension later this year! You can see a preview in action below. To join the waitlist for Postman’s VS Code extension, please click here.

We have a lot more coming in 2023, and I am excited about how we are building the API-first world together!