The Postman Business Model Is In Alignment With Enterprise Objectives

One of the things that became very clear during my conversations with folks at AWS re:Invent last week is that Postman’s revenue model is in alignment with what is needed within the enterprise. To help explain, let’s answer the question I got over and over at re:Invent—how does Postman make money? Steady waves of folks would show up at our booth in the re:Invent expo hall, and usually after a couple minutes of talking about their FREE usage of Postman, and how ubiquitous the tool is at their organization, they would inquire about our pro and enterprise offerings—which is all about helping enterprise organizations get more organized when it comes to doing APIs.

The Postman Pro and Enterprise offerings are all about scaled usage of the platform, which includes the number of collections, users, teams, workspaces, and the collaboration, automation, and orchestration across them. All the core Postman features are free, and will remain free—developers love Postman because of its utility, and we do not intend to mess with that.  Paying for Postman means you are getting more organized about how you manage users, collections, environments, teams, and workspaces, as well as using more monitors, runners, mocks, and documentation. While more usage doesn’t always mean an organizations is doing things in a more logical fashion, but Postman enterprise features center around the organized governance of users, teams, workspaces, collections, and environments, steering enterprise customers towards optimizing how things get done.

Having observability into all of your teams delivering and consuming APIs is the most important thing you can be investing in as part of your enterprise operations—the Postman enterprise tier is centered around charging for collaboration, automation, and scaling your teams using a tool they already are using, which increases observability across your API operations. This is why I am working for Postman. I am regularly conflicted about how the companies I rely upon tier their pricing and scale the business side of what they do. The pricing usually doesn’t reflect my business needs and priorities, and often just puts features out of my reach, or makes it so I cannot scale my consumption. Postman reflects what I need as an API provider and consumer, while also reflecting what enterprises in general are needing when it comes to their API journey.

If you know me, and have worked with me in the past you know I stress over the business ethics of APIs. The business of APIs is the foundation of the API Evangelist blog, and while I feel there is a huge opportunity for defining new products and services using APIs, I also feel there is a lot of examples of bad behavior when it comes to what APIs and API services cost. This is why the Postman monetization strategy makes me so happy. It isn’t about cannibalizing all of the good will we’ve established with developers, it is about continuing to build on this goodwill and helping companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies be more successful in how they deliver and consume APIs. This is a business model I can get behind and passionately evangelize around, because I don’t have to mute myself when it comes to the business of what I am doing—I can be proud of my work, and how I pay my bills.