Alternatives
Products that do what Volt – Fast, Git-native API client written in Zig (Postman alternative) does
Hey HN, I wanted to build something real in Zig, and I was annoyed that Postman needed an account and an internet connection just to send a GET request. So I figured I'd make something I would actually use. It kind of snowballed from there. 50,000+ lines later, it does requests, test assertions, collections, environments, CI/CD reports, import/export, and has a browser-based Web UI (`volt ui`). All in a single binary with zero external dependencies. Some numbers: - Binary size: ~4 MB (Postman: ~500 MB) - Startup: 42ms (Postman: 3-8 seconds) - RAM idle: ~5 MB (Postman: 300-800 MB) -…
- 1JA
Hi HN, 8 months ago, I posted “Ask HN: I built it nobody came, what now?” and got a ton of (not very optimistic) feedback [1]. I took away 3 things: 1. The message wasn’t properly targeted 2. The onboarding experience was terrible. 3. Someone posted some advice to find leads which actually worked, yeah! So here we are. 8 months later. I unfortunately didn’t have a lot of time to put in the tool itself. But I improved the website, improved the onboarding, and got a paying customer who seems to really like the software. So here it is in its current form. Let me know what you think would make…
2021 · jigdev.com
- 2ZB
I created this a year or so ago but recently made updates and I thought people might like to know that it exists. I made this to easily send links or text to someone else verbally, like over the phone or over voice chat (which is what I made it for). The goal is to be able to tell the link to someone else without being ambiguous or needing to spell it out, so I grabbed the words off a Grade 5 level dictionary. I understand that the domain itself doesn’t qualify but I’m trying to get a better domain.
2013 · zigg.be
- 3IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
- 4AS
There are plenty of good tools for load testing such as JMeter, Minigun, and plenty more - but they all have their own set of options to learn. I built this one to support a simpler workflow where you just paste your curl request (or other cli command) after your `spam` config (literally just `spam -r 2 -- curl www.google.com). It's pretty barebones but I'm 100% going to use it in my day to day - figured I'd share it here if it helped anyone else!
2023 · github.com
- 5CC
We're two engineers that got fed up with context switching. Why do we need to do a git push, open a browser tab, wait for some task to actually start, bite nails (or read HackerNews) for 10 minutes or more while dependencies are being installed for the 100th time and finally end up with an invalid YAML error. And for some reason this usually happens in the final stage of the pipeline leading up to the inevitable git commits "Fixed", "Fixed again", "Test", "Really fixed this time". We can do better. We set out to build Zippy. A CI/CD system that works from your terminal. No context…
Mar 2026 · zippy.sh
- 6PR
Hi HN, While building RAG agents, I noticed a lot of token budget was wasted on formatting overhead (HTML tags, JSON structure, whitespace). Existing solutions felt too heavy (often requiring torch/transformers), so I wrote this lightweight, zero-dependency library to solve it. It includes strategies for context packing, PII redaction, and tool output compression. Benchmarks show it can save ~15% of tokens with negligible latency overhead (<0.5ms). Happy to answer any questions!
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 7VS
I’ve been building Volant, a modular microVM orchestration engine that makes running microVMs feel as simple as Docker. It supports cloud-init, GPU/VFIO passthrough (yes, you can run AI/ML workloads in isolated microVMs), booting Docker images via a plugin system, and Kubernetes-style deployments with replication, all from a single CLI(soon to be web UI, see next) Coming soon: a built-in PaaS mode with snapshot-based cold start elimination, sort of like Dokploy, but designed for serverless workloads that boot from memory snapshots instead of containers. Volant is intentionally a…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 8ZA
Hey HN, We’re excited to announce Zant v0.1, an open-source TinyML SDK built in Zig, designed to optimize and deploy neural networks on resource-constrained devices. Unlike existing solutions, Zant focuses on performance, portability, and ease of integration, making it a strong alternative for anyone working on Edge AI and embedded ML. Why Zant? Most TinyML frameworks are either too high-level (requiring bloated runtimes) or too low-level (requiring extensive manual optimization). Zant bridges the gap by offering: - A lightweight but powerful code generation system to translate ML models…
2025 · github.com
- 9LI
Hi HN! I'm Ilya, creator of Localit.io - a translation management system for dev teams who are tired of expensive tools like Lokalise and Phrase. The problem: Traditional TMS solutions charge $100-2000/month for basic localization features. Complex setups take hours, and many charge extra for Git integrations. What we built: - Direct GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket integration (including Enterprise) - AI translations via ChatGPT, DeepL, Google Translate - Professional translators through Gengo - Built-in team chat with message translation - Mobile app for remote translators - Same…
2025 · localit.io
- 10KE
Another HN Desktop client: https://github.com/spennihana/HackerDesktop Last weekend user westoncb posted[1] an app built in kotlin/swing[2]. A comment there mentioned that an electron app might be an interesting alternative, and here is the result of this last week's hackings. It uses the firebase API underneath and elm/electron to interact with kotlin via the spark-kotlin micro rest framework. The icns were made with Adobe Illustrator. The dmg unpacks to a whopping 250MB (since it packages the JRE in addition to all of the usual electron junk). video link:…
2017
- 11AA
Hey HN! I have been working on Ant for a while now, would love to share around now. What is Ant? It's my JavaScript runtime, built from scratch over many hours of work. Much effort has gone into keeping the binary size small, around 9MB at the moment (6.5 MB with -Os). On my M4 Pro, the hono coldstart bench (examples/npm/hono/bench-coldstart.js) lands around 5ms, about 2.4x faster than bun, and 5.8x faster than node. To keep things small, the engine ("Ant Silver") is hand-written, not a wrapper around V8/JSC/SpiderMonkey. The JIT is still a work in progress but it…
May 2026 · github.com
- 12VI
This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.
2022 · docs.vaxiin.io
- 13GA
What it does: A Postman/Insomnia-like TUI for building, sending, and organizing HTTP/GraphQL/gRPC/WebSocket requests. Supports saved collections stored as YAML/JSON files, environment variables, auth presets, response diffing, and request history. Why it's needed: This is the single largest gap in the Go TUI ecosystem. The abandoned wuzz (10.5k stars) proved massive demand for terminal HTTP inspection, but it's been dead for years. Posting (Python, ~6k stars) and ATAC (Rust, ~2k stars) are thriving alternatives in other languages. The Go options — gostman and go-gurl…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 14IB
I finally got fed up with making work + personal Git repos work on my machine. Ever clone a work repository and accidentally make commits using your personal email? Or forget how to make your work repos use your work SSH key? Yeah... same. So I built the tool I've always wanted. GitPersona - a CLI tool for managing many git profiles on a single machine. Shoutout to my boy Codex for helping me finally ship this.
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 15V1
New major update of DuffMan tool. Now it can act as lightweight CLI Postman Client. Features from previous release: - Parse collection and environment files - Fuzz GET parameters - Fuzz form parameters - Fuzz multipart parameters - Fuzz path parameters - Fuzz JSON bodies - Filter output by response status code - Filter output by response time
2024 · github.com
- 16
- 17LB
Howdy friends! Tell me if this is an atrociously terrible idea - I've been working on building a leetcode for clientside devs so we can practice React and Javascript interview questions in a more concise way, I call it clientside.dev I just finished a beta version of it yesterday and plan on releasing it with many more problems on Jan 1st but it's there if you wanna play with it open to any ideas / feedback however mean or nice it may be :)
2022 · vacation-call-335691.framer.app
- 18WB
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 19CA
A couple years ago I was really frustrated by Postman, it couldn't do basic JSON schema validation, and didn't interoperate well with the OpenAPI spec I had to use for serverless deployments. On top of that, they started requiring an account and cloud sync, and other things I just wasn't comfortable with. So what's an engineer to do? Build yet another API Client of course! [0] It's still fairly rough and crashes more often than I like, but it's basically at the point that I've switched most of my usage so I figured I would rip off the bandaid and do a Show HN. Short list of some of the…
2024 · callosum.dev
- 20EL
Hey HN! I built Experiment to solve a common frustration in LLM development: the lack of proper tools for prompt engineering experimentation. Here's what makes it different: Key Features: - Load and edit chat completion logs from CSV files - Fork and modify specific conversation entries - Run inference via Anthropic, Mistral, and OpenAI - Define custom tools using JSONSchema format - Visual tool usage analysis with collapsible, sorted key-value pairs - Full mobile support and available as installable PWA Technical Highlights: - Built with React using custom isomorphic architecture -…
2025 · github.com
- 21ET
Hey Hacker News, For the last 2 months, I've been working on a testing agent to free developers from the endless maintenance of end-to-end tests. You just push up a PR, and our agent analyzes the code changes and automatically visits the preview to test things out like a real human! We also support describing tests in English (or even in the PR description), and we'll go through your site whenever you want via a GitHub action to test and make sure various core flows continue to work as expected. We are looking for early testers and are giving out a generous free tier! Just sign up on the…
2025 · playmatic.ai
- 22KF
My email clients/inbox really fu*ing annoyed me. Tallyman is what happened next: a keyboard driven email client on top of Gmail and Outlook. Your vim muscle memory works (j/k, gg, relative line numbers, counts, ...) 39 rebindable shortcuts, command palette, email templates, themes ... No migration. OAuth only. Verified by Microsoft and live now. Google verification is under review. 30 day free trial, $9/mo per inbox after that. Write me an email if you need an extended trial: [email protected]
Apr 2026 · tallyman.io
- 23AG
Put this together this afternoon. I've been after something to quickly jot down the odd piece of information that I can access later in the day when browsing the web. Hopefully you find it useful. Criticism/thoughts/ideas greatly appreciated. I should add, since all the hard work here lies in the work of others here — garlic.js is a great plugin for handling localstorage. Cheers Jason
2012 · a5.gg
- 24AW
I've spent the past couple of weeks building a Wasm-to-Go translator. It supports a subset of Wasm useful enough to translate SQLite into 600k LoC (~20 MiB) of Go code. It already passes all of my Go SQLite driver's tests across the 20 platforms I support. Performance compared to https://wazero.io/ is a bit of a mixed bag: code that frequently crosses the Go-Wasm boundary improves, but code that spends most of its time in "Wasm land" doesn't. There's probably room for improvement (I'd love to hear your ideas), but this is also a testament to how good the wazero AOT compiler…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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