Lifetime Mac
Developer & terminal tools

Bruno

Offline-first API client that keeps collections in your git repo

Price: Free

Open sourceNothing to buy; source published

Checked on usebruno.com, the page Get it opens.

The catch

Deeper git and team features are subscription-only; only the open-source app is free

The full picture

Everyday request building, environments, scripting and assertions are in the free open-source app, which is what qualifies it here. Deeper git integration, automation and enterprise controls sit behind the Pro and Ultimate subscriptions, and there is no perpetual licence for them. It is an Electron app, so it is heavier than a native Mac client, and the pool of shared public collections is much smaller than Postman's.

Replaces
Postman, Insomnia$108 and $122 a year.
Developer account
None needed

What it looks like

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

Bruno exists because of a specific annoyance: an API client that asks you to log in, then keeps your requests on its own servers and charges per seat to share them. Here a collection is a directory of text files in your repository. You commit it, someone reviews the diff, a branch changes an endpoint alongside the code that serves it, and the history lives where the rest of your history lives.

The app itself is ordinary in the good sense. Build a request, set headers and auth, define environments, write a pre-request or post-response script, add assertions, run a folder as a suite. Existing Postman and Insomnia collections import, so switching does not mean rebuilding everything by hand.

Read the pricing page carefully before you get attached, because this is the part people get wrong. The open-source app is free and stays free, and it is not a crippled demo. But the paid tiers are subscriptions, six or eleven dollars per user per month billed annually, and there is no lifetime option. If what you need is the deeper git workflow or team governance, you are buying a subscription, not escaping one.

It is Electron, so it is not light. If you live in the terminal, curl and httpie with a checked-in shell script cover more ground than people admit.

What owners report

Points that recur across the discussions below. A report of what users say, not our verdict: we don’t review software.

Praised

  • The reason people give for switching is the same one over and over: collections are plain files in the repository, so a change to an endpoint is reviewed in the same pull request as the code
  • Owners repeatedly say the point is that there is no account and nothing leaves the machine, and most arrived the week Postman or Insomnia asked them to log in
  • Several teams describe moving off Postman wholesale rather than one person at a time, crediting the Postman collection importer and a UI their colleagues did not need training for

Criticised

  • Even people recommending it call it rough around the edges next to Postman — missing features, OpenAPI import that drops variables, and edits that silently do not save
  • Buyers of the one-time Golden Edition repeatedly report that the perpetual option was withdrawn in favour of an annual plan without an announcement, leaving stale prices in the README
  • Across the threads there is open scepticism that the free tier will stay as generous as it is; the reassurance people give each other is that the files are plain text and the core can be forked

Details

Works offline
Yes
Apple Silicon
Native
On Setapp
No
Minimum macOS
not stated
Developer
Bruno (usebruno)
Source
github.com
The Bruno page at usebruno.com
The developer’s own page. usebruno.com, captured 22 Sep 2026

Also bought outright