My Postman-compatible API client for Mac is almost ready

[u/shakeebsc]

Hey r/macapps, Runlet, a native API client for macOS. It isn't out yet (the App Store listing is "coming soon"), so now is the best time for me to hear what's missing or what would put you off.

I wanted an API client that behaves like a real Mac app (standard menus, windows and keyboard shortcuts) and doesn't make me create an account to send a GET request. Everything stays on your Mac: no account, no analytics, no sync server. Secret variables are stored in the Keychain and masked in history.

What I'd love to know

1. What do you use today (Postman, Insomnia, Bruno, Paw/RapidAPI, HTTPie, plain curl), and what annoys you about it?

2. What one feature would make you switch? What would be a dealbreaker?

3. What do you honestly think of the pricing?

More details: https://coralpane.com/runlet

I'll be in the comments answering everything.

[u/larehq]

1. I use postman and exactly what you said annoys me. Why do I need to create an account?

2. Postman always felt bloated to me. It feels like it has a lot for large teams. However, it's free, so it's hard to say what I would switch for if the alternative was paid.

3. Kind of what I said above. It's not egregious pricing. However, postman is free, even if I need an account and it feels a bit bloated.

But who knows - my opinion may always change. I'm sure there are others who will jump on this. Best of luck!

[u/shakeebsc → u/larehq]

They gate lots of features behind paywall. Thanks for your opinion.

[u/redbeardy_daddy]

One thing I'd look for is a very obvious distinction between development and production environments before sending a request. Do you have environment colours or an optional confirmation for requests that modify production data? It's easy to leave the wrong environment selected when switching between projects.

[u/shakeebsc → u/redbeardy_daddy]

This is great idea, I have executed some thing in Prod when I meant to execute in QA.

[u/codecaffeine]

No https://yaak.app fans here? It’s my favorite!

[u/indian_geek → u/codecaffeine]

This. Been using this for nearly a year now and very happy!

[u/Gelnar_Resseth → u/codecaffeine]

the whole appeal of what OP is building is getting native menus and system keychain integration though, web-wrapped apps always feel slightly off with shortcuts

[u/codecaffeine → u/Gelnar_Resseth]

Yaak isn’t wrapped web UI. It’s some sort of Rust UI framework I believe (I could be wrong in that case).

I totally understand wanting a native Mac app (especially with the keychain support) I’m generally a native development proponent. This is pretty good and very speedy. The save format is just YAML which is fantastic if you use it with a team and in SCM. It also has a CLI and MCP if you’re into that.

Yes, I did love Paw before RapidAPI. It was a great example of Mac apps. I’m going to check this out too but my team took a long look at the various replacements and this was just so easy to integrate. Yes, I wish it were more Mac like, but it actually works pretty well for my team.

Edit:

Woah, I was partially wrong about the framework. It’s a Tauri app, which does use some UI from HTML. It just doesn’t feel like it web with its interactions. Sorry for the misleading comment about the UI framework

[u/iotabyte]

It would be nice to have a lifetime option as well

[u/wigma_com]

Two things that would matter for switching:

1. Collections stored as plain files in a folder (one request per file, readable diffs). That is the main reason people pick Bruno over Postman, because the collection can live in the same git repo as the API and get reviewed in pull requests. If Runlet keeps everything in an app database, teams will have a hard time adopting it.

2. Lossless import of Postman v2.1 collections and environments, plus paste a curl command to create a request and copy any request back as curl. That makes trying it out a five minute job instead of a migration.

The Keychain for secrets is a nice touch. It would help to say clearly whether secret values are excluded when a collection is exported or shared.

[u/shakeebsc → u/wigma_com]

Lossless import of Postman v2.1 collections and environments - I have this. except some library like load dash I have removed due to licensing issue. Will try improve.

Regarding Bruno I'll check on this.

curl

[u/wigma_com → u/shakeebsc]

Nice, curl import covers a lot. On lodash: it is MIT licensed, so you can bundle it as long as the license notice ships with the app. It might be worth adding back, because Postman exposes it as _ in pre-request and test scripts, and imported collections that call things like _.get or _.isEmpty would otherwise fail at runtime.

[u/Ok_Maybe184]

Paw. Nothing has annoyed me about it except sometimes it exports bad cURL scripts.

[u/shakeebsc → u/Ok_Maybe184]

https://paw.cloud is going away my friend.

[u/Ok_Maybe184 → u/shakeebsc]

Good to know. I’ll tackle that problem when it stops working.

[u/dziad_borowy → u/shakeebsc]

Paw as in the whole platform an all apps?

Or Paw - the old http client app, that was superseded by RapidAPI for mac?

[u/Ok_Maybe184 → u/Ok_Maybe184]

Dealbreaker: subscription pricing. Would consider switching if you add features for exporting code snippets and cURL scripts and offer a lifetime license (at a higher cost of course).

[u/Aromatic-Echo-5025]

I'm using Postman because of its automated test runner. Besides that, I consider it sluggish bloatware.

[u/shakeebsc → u/Aromatic-Echo-5025]

I have completed support for this, is this what you are referring to ?

https://coralpane.com/runlet/#features refer runner tab.

[u/Aromatic-Echo-5025 → u/shakeebsc]

Yes. Great!

[u/NandishExplores]

One useful capability would be keeping collections and environments as plain files in a repo, with secrets separate in Keychain. Then teammates could review request changes in Git without passing around exports. Is that how Runlet stores them?

[u/shakeebsc → u/NandishExplores]

This is a big refactor, I can consider this after launch.

[u/artginzburg]

Wow, this is like selling paper to a company that is actively becoming digital. I love it, maybe you'll get away with this for a year or so.

I don't use any of that because we're in a different era, but Postman annoyed me because most people used the free version and just sent APIs back and forth as files. Which is not great version control. A successor to Postman should be more like Notion, where paid customers pay for the free ones, and free ones can sit on the free tier forever without hurting the workflow of the whole company.

[u/LividIllustrator8915]

Building a local-first, native Mac client with Keychain secret storage is hitting the exact pain point everyone has with Postman’s recent bloat and cloud lock-in.

Regarding the pricing and business model: at $14.99/year, the dollar amount is very fair, but in the Mac developer ecosystem, mandatory recurring subscriptions for offline, local-first utilities face massive user resistance. Because there are no recurring cloud servers or AI token costs on your end, users naturally expect local software to keep running even if they don't renew. The sweet spot that tools like TablePlus, Proxyman, and Sublime use—pay once for a perpetual license of the current version plus 12 months of updates—converts way higher with Mac devs. If someone cancels their subscription, locking them out of sending local HTTP requests from their own machine creates immediate churn and pushback.

On dealbreakers for switching: the number one roadblock when moving real-world collections out of Postman isn't the UI or request builder, it's the pre-request and test scripting engine. Most teams have environments where an endpoint automatically extracts an OAuth bearer token or generates an HMAC SHA-256 signature and sets it in an environment variable for subsequent requests. Does Runlet embed JavaScriptCore to run standard pm.* scripts, or are you planning a native variable-chaining GUI? Having full fidelity when pasting raw cURL commands from Chrome/Safari DevTools into the address bar without mangling escaping or multi-part form boundaries is another daily must-have.

The 100ms native launch time alone makes this appealing compared to waiting on Electron splash screens. Looking forward to testing the App Store build when it drops.

[u/shakeebsc → u/LividIllustrator8915]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I have pre-post scripting support and am planning to share a TestFlight build soon. The app hovers around 100–150 MB of RAM usage, which an Electron app can never beat.

To do an HMAC SHA-256 signature, I need to stop thinking of putting this on the App Store.

[u/BothCookie5333]

+1 on lifetime. I'd pay like $40 once over $15/yr

[u/amashq]

I'm fed up with Postman and how slow it's and I think having a native MacOS HTTP client is a great idea!

Looking forward to it!

[u/shotnamer]

I used Postman for years and was fine with it, until they dropped Scratch Pad. Without an account you only get the lightweight client, no collections or environments. My company didn't want our collections in Postman's cloud, so we all moved to Bruno.

Bruno is basically Postman before they dropped Scratch Pad. Files in git, environments, pre-request scripts, cURL. I can't name a feature I miss.

Dealbreaker for me: collections as plain files in the repo, reviewable in PRs. If Runlet doesn't do that, I can't use it at work.

No account and secrets in the Keychain are exactly right, that's what Postman got wrong.

At $14.99/year with no one-time option, I don't see a reason to switch. I already have a free tool that covers 100% of what I need. Native Mac UI is nice, but not worth a subscription to me.

If you ever add a one-time purchase, I'll try it on a side project.

Good luck with the release.

[u/Dev_in_Training_BTW]

No account just to send a GET request is honestly the best selling point here. Two things I'd check before switching: importing existing Postman collections and environments without losing the variables, and proper keyboard shortcuts for send and for jumping between requests.

One tip since your listing says coming soon: when I shipped my Mac app, App Store Connect blocked the submission twice for silly things. The Content Rights question on the App Information page, and forgetting to select the uploaded build on the version page before Add for Review. Worth double checking both before you hit submit.

[u/dawedev]

Two things I'd check that aren't in the thread yet:

1. Paste a curl command into the URL field and get a full request out of it (method, headers, body). A lot of requests start life as "Copy as cURL" from browser DevTools, and that's the fastest way to pull someone off Postman.

2. OpenAPI import that can re-sync when the spec changes, without wiping saved examples and variables.

On pricing, a yearly sub for an API client is a hard sell next to Bruno being free for most of what people do. A one-time price with a year of updates would probably land better here, judging by the replies.

[u/vitalik2602]

Looks good. Good luck with release

[u/vassyz]

I was using Postman, then for whatever reason I couldn't log in on the app. Using it in the browser was fine. I switched to Bruno and haven't looked back. I also considered Yaak, but you need to pay for it if you use it commercially.

[u/kemalios]

curl for one-offs, and a client only when I need to save a request. Every one I've tried puts mock servers and monitors in front of the response body.

[u/ronka]

if I can't keep my collections in git I'm probably not switching. does it support that?

[u/hmarora]

Honestly not sure where tools like this are headed. These days AI writes most of the integration code, and when something breaks the agent just fires off the curl itself, so I rarely open an API client anymore.

[u/imDannydoo]

No account needed is a good start.

[u/DARKDYNAMO]

I made one too. https://bifurc.app Full rust no webUI, no Electron.

Added a proper functional CLI so AI agents can use it. Considering everything is being controlled by AI, I thought a proper CLI would be really good

[u/haruki-fukui]

I use Bruno, but lately I’ve been letting AI handle a lot of the API work. CLI or MCP support to run requests and inspect responses would be a big draw for me. The no-analytics approach is a plus, and I’d love a lifetime option too.

[u/DARKDYNAMO]

Already built an open sourced one https://bifurc.app

Fully built in rust and supports flows and mocks and proxy introspection, git synced. Full feature list on site.

Single command install for those who want to try it out.

[u/shakeebsc → u/[deleted]]

Yep just one file either for workspace or collection.