From Frustration to Solution: The Pain That Built Voiden

Quick disclaimer: This isn't a literature review or a meticulously chronological account. It's just my honest effort to capture some genuine frustrations and concerns I've experienced firsthand.

As someone who once proudly identified as a "startup developer," I was accustomed to the adrenaline-fueled chaos of shipping features at warp speed and juggling a dozen tools at once. When Postman first emerged as a Chrome extension, it genuinely felt revolutionary. Finally, an API tool that didn’t make me feel like I was filing my taxes.

But over time, that excitement dimmed. Postman expanded rapidly, gaining features like a hoarder accumulating antiques - impressive individually, but overwhelming collectively. Before I knew it, using Postman went from feeling like driving a car to sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing 787 (intimidating controls and instruments everywhere). Sure, muscle memory kept developers anchored to the same handful of features they'd used for years, but the flood of new functionalities, though important to some stakeholders, became unnecessarily complex for most. The "one-size-fits-all" philosophy - giving users everything and hoping they'd find something useful - simply wasn't working for developers who just needed to efficiently test and document APIs.

Then came the growing sense of confinement. Sharing collections was initially effortless, but soon it morphed into something else entirely - a rigid ecosystem dictating workflows rather than adapting to them. Even worse, as someone deeply familiar with GDPR and data privacy, I started sweating at the mere thought of tokens and secrets drifting into opaque, cloud-based abysses.

Meanwhile, other contenders entered the arena, each earnestly addressing individual frustrations: Insomnia championed security, Bruno highlighted its offline-first capability, and the competition genuinely improved the landscape. But nobody seemed to be taking a step back and asking the bigger question: could we entirely reimagine API tooling if we think outside the “Postbox” ?

Fusion to Voiden: Cutting the Clutter for Devs

The best developer tools, after all, have one defining quality: they quietly step aside, letting developers focus purely on the task at hand. So, fueled by equal parts optimism and naiveté, we set out to tackle the problem ourselves. Voiden didn’t begin life as Voiden - it began as “Fusion”, a promising extension of our marketplace.

Fusion quickly gathered fans. Organizations loved the idea, some even dubbing it "groundbreaking." It had connectors to 20+ integrations, from Confluence, Jira, GitHub issues, and being able to publish documentation to different platforms. But then reality checked in: everyone wanted a tweak, an adjustment, a bit more customization, one more integration. Our mistake? We built extensibility without true openness. We had inadvertently limited the very flexibility we aimed to provide. We were the bottleneck.

Taking inspiration from Obsidian’s community-driven ecosystem, we evolved Fusion into Voiden—simpler, cleaner, and deliberately designed for community contribution. It was about giving developers the tools they needed without dictating how those tools should be used.

Voiden is our attempt to break away from cumbersome UX, restrictive platforms, and monopolistic cloud dependencies. It's offline-friendly, community-powered, and GDPR-conscious by design. And while we didn't build it out of boredom or self-loathing (well, mostly), we did build it because developers deserve better.

Because, at the end of the day, who wants to wrestle through countless menus just to fire off a single API request?

Commitment Statement

That said, we're still at the very beginning of our journey. This year, we're setting two ambitious goals: opening up plugin publishing for anyone to create and share, and - brace yourself - open-sourcing Voiden entirely.

Yes, that's my official commitment, right here, right now.

Here's to giving developers the flexibility, control, and freedom they genuinely deserve.

Speaking of control, feel free to join our GitHub Discussions to share feedback and help shape Voiden even before we open source it.