Building and Testing APIs like you code (Offline, Open source)
Yesterday Postman had an outage again. Been a postman power user when it started but things have changed a lot since. Like many SaaS platforms, It became bloated and unusable for small teams and for devs who prefer privacy.
Built an alternative, initially for our own use. The idea was to build a Tool (and not a platform). Something that we can use to test the 100s of APIs we work on in a simple way.
And eventually this became significant enough so I can share it here:
Thats the tool: https://voiden.md/
Few things that are unique:
Free, open source, offline, git native
Wanted to bring specs, tests, and docs together in the same executable Markdown file . You can structure APIs, tests, and docs however you want and everything stays executable/runnable in the same place.
One thing I dont like about other clients is that they make you fill fixed forms. In Voiden you will see a "Programmable UI": This means that you can compose API requests using blocks with slash commands (endpoints, headers, auth, params, etc.). Just like LEGO. Or like Notion. You are not forced into a fixed UI. You can compose your own workflow in a flexible document.
Reusable blocks: These blocks can be connected to (and reused by) multiple docs. Change a value once, update everywhere. Just like in code when we add an extra logic to an imported method. (In other API clients you would need to duplicate stuff or just use environment variables to substitute.)
Plugins: In order to avoid bloating the tool, added extra functionality like GRPC, Websockets, scripting etc
No account needed. No telemetry.
Available for windows, mac, linux
Link to repo: https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden
download here: https://voiden.md/download
Ideas and feedback welcome!
Outstanding and good work keep sharing
thanks so much! please feel free to share any ideas and thoughts you have after trying out!
great work brother, keep it up
Postman going the bloated SaaS route was inevitable once they took funding that pattern plays out the same way every time. What’s interesting about Voiden is you’ve essentially made the document the source of truth instead of the platform, which is a fundamentally different philosophy. Most API clients store your state in their cloud. Yours stores it in a file you own. That’s not just a privacy choice, it’s an architecture choice that makes the tool actually portable. The Notion-style block composing for requests is the detail I’d lead with more prominently on the landing page that’s the thing that makes someone who’s been burned by Postman’s locked-in UX genuinely curious. How are you thinking about monetization given it’s free and open source?
thanks for your comments. To answer your question: we are NOT thinking of monetization. Our revenue lives elsewhere, so this is something we literally built for us and the reason we open sourced it is that while we want to keep supporting it, we would prefer if the community gets involved..The way we will benefit is by having smart folks help us improve a product that we actually use every day. So its a way of giving to the community but at the same time improving a tool that we believe will be the norm in the future.
That's actually a cleaner model than most open source projects admit to upfront, the internal tool that gets open sourced because the team uses it every day has a completely different quality floor than something built for an imagined user. You're dogfooding it constantly which means the bugs that matter get fixed and the features that get added are ones someone actually needed. The community involvement angle makes more sense in that context too. You're not asking contributors to maintain someone else's vision, you're inviting them into something the core team is genuinely invested in. Curious what the internal use case looks like, are you an API-heavy team or was this solving a specific workflow problem that Postman kept getting wrong?