This is not a rant, I am just posting my experience with Postman billing so that others can benefit from my knowledge. There are several things about their billing that I find obscure and can lead to unintended costs.
I recently signed up for the Enterprise annual plan with postman. We have a second team that uses our apis, that I wanted to grant access to test our apis using our workspace. I had read that users granted viewer access did not incur charges. This turned out to be incorrect. Only “partner” viewers are free, not regular viewers. This misunderstanding caused quite a bit of extra billing. However, this is not what upset me. I will go over my issues now as they are quite deceptive in some cases.
- Billing warning: There is no warning when adding a user that they will increase your billing. You really should review your billing before and after adding a user. Postman should warn you before doing something that increases your billing with flex billing.
- Flex Billing: When I signed up, I wanted to only sign up for 5 admins / editors, and that is ALL I wanted to sign up for. I did not want the plan to auto adjust, and to stop me from adding anything that would exceed my allotted amounts without me making changes to my plan. If I wanted to be on a flex plan, I would have preferred that to be a choice.
- Annual billing: When you add a user, and then remove them, you are billed for that user for the entire year regardless of how long you added them to your cycle. You cannot lower your user count for the current year, until your next billing cycle. Adding users / removing users occasionally? Do not use the annual plan.
- Billing cycle: Our billing cycle started just days ago, and I have reduced our user count to five, yet I am going to be charged the entire year for twenty one users. This ties into the previous point. Annual billing should be pro-rated for how long a user was added or a feature was added. Testing out a feature with annual billing? Be prepared to pay for it for the entire year. Add a user for a week or month? Yes, once again, be prepared to pay for it for the entire year. This is absurd.
- Changing Billing: Again, our billing cycle JUST ended, and I was shocked by our bill. It was two times what I was expecting. So, I immediately went to investigate, and found out all this information. Then I immediately tried to change our user count, and found out I cannot. Even though our cycle just started days ago, I cannot alter it. It told me I had to alter it when the cycle completed. So I tried doing that. It would not let me. It gave me this wonderful error.
For the TLDR crowd: Be very very careful when adding features and users, especially if you are on the annual plan. It ends up costing you more. Postmen’s billing practices are deceptive and can cost you a lot for the year when using annual billing.
Hopefully, this post will keep others from being pulled into the same quicksand that I was. As it stands I am now having to explain to my managers why the budget I was given for postman was blown. 