There are options between free and enterprise.
I mean, I don’t work for Postman Im just a general user…
It was great to have this for free, but at the same time, Postman are a business and their user base has grown exponentially over recent years… are we really surprised that they want to start charging for usage?
Is it ideal? … No
But is it a deal breaker? … Not for me personally, I’ll make do.
Yes, there are options between free and enterprise. But not really when it comes to collection runs since enterprise is the only one that is unlimited in that regard.
250 runs per month on professional wouldn’t even be enough for a day. Much less so for a whole team.
I’m not suprised that they want to start charging for usage. I’m suprised that they’re starting to charge for something that’s been free ever since with so such notice and with a monthly limit that’s almost like blocking that feature entirely. I’d be totally fine if they introduced the limit only for the free user.
I don’t consider this missing feature a deal breaker since i have a work around.
But such sudden changes in existing functionality are a different thing…
Another option for tweaking the setnextRequest would be to setup a collection webhook. You can trigger the whole collection from one POST request and it would output the order in which the setNextReqest calls are executed. For example;
To my knowledge, this would fall under the same category of “scheduled runs” which is not part of the chargeable usage / limit.
I haven’t used collection webhooks before but perhaps i’ll look into it, thanks.
But either way it’s just another workaround for a thing that IMHO shouldn’t need a workaround.
And you forgot a kinda important word in your last statement:
“[…] which is not part of the chargeable usage / limit YET.”
I just want to emphasize this:
Currently i’m worried that there are more questionable decisions to come.
Playing devil’s advocate…
A “tool you can rely on” will likely always cost money.
Can you truly trust a free tool? …
There are costs with developing and maintaining software whether we like it or not. Even open-source tooling requires people’s time and effort if the lifestyle of those that build open-source changes those “free” tools suffer too. Or more likely, if the copyright holder believes that their open-source tool could be marketed they could simply stop developing the open-source and move it to closed-source.
Postman is not an open-source tool, they have an entire workforce behind the scenes. Most companies will offer “basic” usage for free to entice you in, but the main features will always cost money. (The argument here is what we the users vs the company consider ‘basic’ usage).
The people on here talking about moving to Insomnia, that’s fine, but they too have a pricing plan, whos to say they won’t change their packages too?
You could spend a few months migrating only to be slapped with the same restrictions if they so choose.
People are also arguing that limiting “local collection runs” is out of order and unjustified. But there are services behind the scenes that sync those collection runs, for example; so other team members also have visibility.
It also sync’s so that you can switch between desktop client and browser and still see your run results and it stores this ‘past run’ data ‘somewhere’.
I think there is more happening with the collection runner than a lot of people realise, it’s not just a client that runs on your local machine and nothing else.
So why not give us a free way to actually run local, without any reporting to postman or external requests?
I don’t know? 
Maybe because the cost of decoupling from the sync services would be hugely expensive for the Postman development team? … For a seemingly small win, when other methods of running collections still exist (Newman / Cli etc.).
That all is fantastic, and I think it is worth money to sync collections and what not. I say this as a representative of a company that pays for professional. ($36 per seat per month). What is the problem here is that now I have to go out of my way to try to use terrible workarounds for a problem that didn’t exist before an arbitrarily imposed limitation on a local resource.
Let’s go over what I pay for:
I use the git support to help save collections and open api specs.
I use the google workspace SSO to help my team sign in easier.
I use roles and permissions.
I use private workspaces.
I use the postman collection runner to help develop and test APIs.
(And think whatever you will, we only need to run that from our local resources, and not from the cloud or in an automated fashion)
Here’s what I don’t use:
I don’t need monitors, I don’t want them.
I don’t need the static IP addresses
I don’t need custom domains
I don’t care about integrations
I don’t care about the history or other people’s run results.
With enterprise:
I don’t care about IAM, SCIM, SAML, Analytics, Deployment, Private API network, API Governance, or security modules, partner workspaces or paying with a PO.
This is attempt to gain a 2.75x upcharge from an already paying customer to allow me to run a series of requests to my own computer. It feels really bad. The ham-handed attempts from postman employees on the thread to pretend this is a good change and deflect from the subject at hand feels really bad. Don’t treat your customers like they’re stupid and can’t understand. I suggested to my team that postman was a no-brainer, but now I have egg on my face.
Limiting local collection runs on basic and professional is most definitely out of order. If 250 runs a month wipes out postman’s profit-margin on operational costs to support local collection runs, then they have some serious engineering problems going on. There is no excuse for this other than greed, plain and simple. I don’t want to see postman go down, I say this as someone who is invested in the tool and finds it useful enough to pay more than what I even think it’s worth at professional. I really hope that we’re actually being listened to here.
This exactly, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Ultimately this is a choice that we as users have to make. As mentioned before, for me this isn’t a deal breaker. If it is for you that’s entirely your choice.
I think your comment on the staff is a little uncalled for. The people responding in this thread did not make this decision, it’s not their fault, they simply work for the company and from what I have read so far they are trying to suggest alternative ways to complete your Postman tasks and providing information to try and help people understand what changes have been made.
Are they going to quit their jobs because they don’t agree with an imposed collection runner limit or push forward and do their best?.. I know what I would do.
I’m not trying to be obstructive here, I hear what you are saying… Like I mentioned before I’m an avid user of Postman and it is a shame that something that was free is no longer… but doesn’t that describe the whole world at the moment?
Netflix has increased prices (for the same service)
Amazon Prime subscribers will see prices rise from £79 a year to £95 a year (for the same service)
Twitter bought in a new paid-for service
BT recently increased my phone bill by £5+ per month (for the exact same service)
Slack recently implemented a change in subscription charges
EDF put my energy bills up (for the exact same usage)
Microsoft’s Office 365 price increased
To name but a few …
Granted the message could have been announced a lot better but why is it such a shock that a company like Postman also implements a new charge?
The thing I really don’t understand is the number of people saying that they now have to use workarounds and this is an issue? … Monitors, Newman / Cli, etc. aren’t workarounds, they are legitimate ways to run collections and it really doesn’t take much more effort or time to run in this way.
I also noticed on the same subject that people are saying setNextRequest is far more tricky to tweak and test using Newman … But you literally get the same output, which shows the order in which things execute:
And honestly, it took me about 30 seconds to export the collection and trigger the Newman run…
For repetitive tasks, I even created myself a batch file… so I can just click on the .bat, it prompts me for an output directory and a script file and then it auto-runs my scripts and produces a report. I use this when developing my test scripts etc. before pushing the collection to GitHub pipelines. I actually prefer doing it this way because I can be sure that the scripts will run exactly as they do in the pipeline.
As I said, this is ultimately a choice, for me, it’s not a deal breaker, I’ll be sitting tight for now.
I hope some of the suggestions I have made in this thread will help those that are looking for alternative ways to run their collections.
I’m not saying that they’re bad people. I’m not even saying that this is their fault. I’m sure their hands are tied. But the net effect is that the communication is poor. I empathize for the position of the employees, but it leaves me and what looks like many others left in the dark, and that is a poor job on Postman, the company, of which they are representatives of here. Maybe Abhinav should chime in.
Great, I get it. I signed up to pay for the professional license for postman for my org, and understand that price increases come with the territory. One of the features that was included is effectively no longer included, with virtually no notice. We are not receiving the same service we were paying for before, and it does not feel like there is a good faith reason as to why. I am not looking for a freebee, I am looking to understand why I am no longer getting what I signed up for. I’m angry about it.
But make no mistake, Postman did not increase their charges, they changed their offering. In fact, I would have been fine with a modest increase in the cost of the current offering, if given the same offering. I could even understand putting a limit to curb excess / abuse. But a limit of 250 LOCAL collection runs on a team of any size per month?? I really don’t know how anyone could think that is close to reasonable.
I pay for Slack too. If Slack took away huddles, and said you need change your plan to pay 2.75x more for a plan that has bunch of things you’re never going to use, I’d be angry, and I’d want to know why.
If we can use newman and setnextrequest to run a collection without limits, then what exactly is the reasoning to limit the UI in the same regard? I don’t want to have to work around a feature that previously worked for what I signed up for, no matter how easy that workaround might be. I want the feature I thought I was getting when I signed up.
Hi @supply-explorer-3481 Jason 
If you have purchased a professional plan with Postman, you will not be impacted until your plan renewal date. You will continue to have unlimited collection runner runs on your current plan. If you are unsure of when your renewal is due, please reach out to us.
If the change impacts your current workflows, please write to us at [email protected] so we can understand your use case better and help you get unblocked.
This is the type of communication that is not helping your company’s case here.
You changed your offering in a bewildering manner and whether or not you admit it - you are attempting to force customers who already pay quite the premium for what is effectively a GUI for cURL to pay 2.75x more.
The company’s answers have repeatedly been to clarify the date that the change will happen. The issue isn’t WHEN the change will happen it is simply the fact that is happening to begin with.
Hi there
I got a technical question regarding the local collection runs vs using the Postman CLI.
I used to create do some requests, get their response and store their unique id’s in a environment (using postman.setEnvironmentVariable() in a test script).
What works is that I can run a collection using Postman CLI (as suggested in this thread). My issue however is that the variables that are being set in the tests script when it is run with Postman CLI aren’t being stored anywhere in the environment. Running the collection locally in Postman worked flawlessly for that case.
Postman CLI isn’t a suitable replacement for local collection runs in this case…
Any advise on how to solve that issue? Am I missing something?
@jingle If you only send one request at at time with Postman (like cURL), then this limitation won’t be an issue, but it also means you’re only using Postman in an extremely limited fashion! Check out the list of Postman Features and the resources available on our Learning Center to learn more about what you can do with Postman. 
@rovirs I don’t believe there’s an easy way to do that with the Postman CLI but you could:
--export-environment <path> option that will export the environment with the updated values before the end of the run, more info on GitHub
If this limit gets enforced its highly likely all my clients will just drop Postman as it will become unusable. I hope you revert this.
I hit the 25 limit during development of a collection in a single morning alone. The inevitable is that Postman has already spoken. We know what is coming.
This is pretty ridiculous. Paying users should get unlimited local collection runs no matter what plan. Absolutely absurd.
25 or 250 is effectively 0. Where did those numbers come from when the limits on monitors/Postman API/Cloud runs are a much-more-reasonable 10k/month? Why don’t you just remove the entire Run Collection UI altogether?
Not all of us get everything right the first try (or the first 25 tries) and we need to use manual runs because it’s the only way to use SetNextRequest and the only way to see the headers of requests/responses. I’d love to be able to assume every change I make (and the rest of my team makes) to every collection (new request, edited request, new test, new pre-request script, etc) would work the first time and every subsequent time and I could just make those changes and our CICD pipeline would be happy, but that’s not how development works. Maybe the Postman folks are so good that they can do that, but the rest of the planet relies on manual collection runs before we check that in. You’re asking us to not test our work and that’s unacceptable in any professional setting.
Whether it’s now or a year from now or 5 years from now doesn’t change the fact that you’re removing an essential and wildly valuable piece of functionality.
@dleenhouts We’re not removing any piece of functionality. We’ve talked about the reasoning behind the new limits in this post: 250 collection runs per month on Professional? - #81 by joyce
Re: setNextRequest, as @w4dd325 pointed out you can use it just as well in the Postman CLI/Newman, or Monitors: 250 collection runs per month on Professional? - #95 by w4dd325, if you are struggling to get it to work there feel free to open a new topic and we’ll be able to help you!