How I Debug APIs Without Postman Taking Over My RAM

Postman was a Chrome extension when I first used it. Lightweight, fast, did one thing well. Then it became an Electron app. Then it wanted me to create an account. Then it started syncing to the cloud. Then it added workspaces, teams, monitors, mock servers, flow diagrams, and an AI assistant. The download is now over 200 MB. For a tool that sends HTTP requests. I'm not saying Postman is bad. For teams that use its collaboration features, it's valuable. But if you just need to test an API endpoint -- send a request, see the response, check the status code -- you don't need a 200 MB application running a Chromium instance in the background. What API testing actually involves When developers say "API testing," they usually mean one of three things: Exploratory testing. You're poking at a new API to understand how it works. You send GET requests to different endpoints, try various parameters, and read the responses. This is the discovery phase. Integration testing. You're verifying that y