@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
I don’t see any discussion of how you came to such tiny numbers. Why 25 and not 25000?
that’s a very interesting way to say we paid a consulting firm to get ROI numbers and now our VC’s want their money.
So you try to force everyone up a tier with some arbitrary limit and deflect any valid criticism at what a confidence killing and un-user friendly change this is.
I’m completely disapointed. This limitation is ridiculous. I don’t know any software that run LOCAL and limits their usage. It’s like a photoshop where you can edit only 2 photos per day. Or an excel that allows to create only 25 rows. Wants incredible 250 rows? PAY MORE !!! More than 250 rows? Subscribe to the ULTIMATE ENTERPRISE PREMIUM PLATINUM.
You asked:
As a startup, do you have any advice for what we should be doing?
At first, I thought it was just a ham-handed attempt to monetize their product line, and I was hoping that they’d quickly self-correct.
The pendulum has swung from underpriced to wildly overpriced. This model of charging us exorbitant rates to run tests on our own hardware is ill-conceived and feels punitive. Fine, charge fair market rates for cloud-based services, but this current pricing for local test runs is simply not rational.
The deafening silence to our objections makes it clear that Postman has no interest in servicing startups and indie developers anymore. So be it.
My advice: Consider other tools. As a startup, we’re giving up on Postman…
Hey @robert.m.ryan , there are other ways to run your collection, using the Postman CLI for example.
There’s a couple of posts in this thread that are worth highlighting again:
Yep, I understand that we can use CLI. In fact, that’s what I am temporarily using now that I’ve exhausted my monthly usage limit and while I evaluate alternative tools.
As an aside, the very fact that we can use the CLI lays bare the silliness of the GUI usage caps.
By the way, please do not take my comments the wrong way: As a business owner and software developer, I think Postman should charge a fee for its software. I even signed up for a basic subscription.
Only after I paid my subscription, and started to run some tests, did I run into the outrageous limitation of 25 tests per month. Not 25 a day, but 25 a month?!
And, as this thread suggests, even 250/mo is an unrealistic limitation. The suggestion that we have to pay $1200/year/user for using the software to run tests on our own hardware is pretty hard to defend. I do not spend that much for any other development tool, most of which are far more critical to our development process than Postman is. And there are just too many good alternative testing platforms out there.
Hey, I get it, Postman has to pick a market. But this original question was about “what should [startups] do,” and the sad reality is that Postman has simply priced itself out of that market.
The OP was not looking for a free tool. He is a paying customer.
I think most of the participants on this thread are open to some cost. We’re merely questioning a pricing structure that costs $1200 per user per year to run a reasonable number of tests locally on our own hardware.
As an aside, I am not sure if I would have brought up the term “trust” within this context. With no offense to the well-intentioned engineering, support, and product staff on this forum, this whole mess has greatly undermined our trust in the company. Even if they reverse course and introduce a rational pricing scheme, they have burned away a ton of goodwill.
My company has invested a lot in Postman usage. Its a good tool, and has been very helpful for us. But, we are currently on the Professional license. The 250 limit has impacted us, and although it would be hard to move, we will still need to seriously consider migrating to something else.
Have I misunderstood this? We have 36 users on a professional licenses, with a combined 250 run limit? This aint going to work for us.
We were considering purchasing licenses, but stopped due to the 250 limit. Whatever the reasons are, this new money scheme is a real turn off.
So if we can use the CLI, why can’t we use the UI? We have for years. It runs on our own hardware. You introduced a ridiculous arbitrary limit, and went out of your way to put a wall in front of an existing process, with no benefit to the end user.
Not that I’m too interested in the business justification, I’m just here to disable your emails - within a couple of sprints of this announcement we’d stopped all active development in Postman, created a .net Framework and created tickets to migrate our existing test suites. Your support team tried to soften the blow by extending extra runs, but why would we bother with that, it’s just kicking the can down the road, and your company has shown you can’t be trusted.
We’ve gone from being moderately happy users with dozens of professional licenses to not paying you a penny and having an incredibly low opinion of Postman. Great job, guys.
I’m very disappointed about this. I have used Postman since 2016 and introduced this tool to many of the companies I have worked for and currently worked. And we are currently paying the team price per seat so we can sync the collection and use it as our integration test storage. I just don’t understand the limit on the collection run, as it cost you no resources at all. since they are executed locally. Where I would understand if you charge things like collection number, fork number, etc. If this is gonna continue where I need to wait 30 secs to run a request, we are gonna drop postman and use an alternative.
In the begginning you remove ‘run collection’ from free and basic plan - ok, we have moved to ‘Proffessional monthly’
Now, you remove ‘run flow’ for ‘Proffessional monthly’
Are you kidding me? I wasted hudge time for creating my collection of flows, and i cant share it?
Came here to pile in I guess. We have non-devs who use our collections that the devs setup for them. There is NO chance they are going to be able to startup the CLI or any other work arounds people mentioned.
I am also a paying customer and it’s one thing, to have price increases. We just did that too. 5ish% across many of our offerings. You know what we didn’t do? 300-500% increase. We don’t even have loads of API/automation testers hitting 100s of endpoints and collections. Instead I use it to help my accounts team self-service some reporting and data management.
Guess what I did in 1 hour today. I ran the runner 23 times, testing a new collection for the account managers. Looks like you aren’t getting any more reports this month (I still have unlimited on my yearly plan but this helps me know what I have to do)
We are a small company that mostly supports non-profits. My budget cant take on this price hike so I will also be looking somewhere else.
@zack.bessler Wouldn’t the scheduled collection runs or monitors be an option for them? Instead of manually running the collection they can either have it running every day at a specific time, or trigger a run manually from there instead. No need for the CLI if that’s something they do not use heavily.
This might hit some of their needs for some of the weekly reporting they do. However, adhoc data requests, adding new users, and a few more upcoming use cases will not work well.
Sure theres a work-around of:
I think there are three problems here.
I was more thinking about scheduling the run once every weekday, as it sounded like a repetitive task they needed to do.
To your questions:
If you want to explore the different options for your use-case I’d recommend opening another topic. 
