Picking the Tool Took a Weekend. Proving We Hadn’t Broken Anything Took Two Weeks.
If you read the first piece, you know the context. In March 2026, Postman removed collaborative workspaces from the free tier. For our four-person team, staying meant ~$912/year.
So we evaluated alternatives and chose Requestly.
We chose Requestly for three reasons — all of which mattered more after the first week:
- It does something the others don’t
It intercepts live traffic from your running app. Priya could watch real requests, modify them, and save them directly into a collection.
That replaced an entire debugging loop.
- Git-backed sync matched how we already work
Code, docs, infra — everything lives in GitHub.
Postman was the only thing sitting outside that system.
Requestly pulled it back in.
- Team features without a paywall
The combination of open source + real collaboration + $0 cost wasn’t matched anywhere else we looked.
The Part That Actually Matters: Import
Tools are easy to pick.
Migrations are where things break.
We weren’t moving a demo setup. We had:
- 6 collections
- 4 environments
- OAuth + token refresh logic
- Webhooks reverse-engineered from bad docs
- Months of test scripts
We treated this like a production change and wrote a checklist before importing:
Migration Checklist
- Structure (folders, nesting)
- Environments + variables
- Auth configs
- Pre-request + test scripts
- Request bodies (especially multipart)
Exporting from Postman
Before importing anything, we exported our existing collections in the most compatible format.
Steps:
- Open your collection
- Click the ••• (three dots) menu
- Select Export
- Download the JSON file
Importing into Requestly
Steps:
- Open Requestly
- Go to Collections
- Click Import (or drag and drop the file)
- Click Postman collections and Environments
- Select the exported JSON
- Open the imported collection
Within a few seconds, the entire structure appeared:
- All collections
- Nested folders
- Requests and endpoints
No manual setup required.
What Worked
Exported from Postman (v2.1) → imported into Requestly.
- Structure: intact, including deep nesting
- Environments: all correct
- Auth: Bearer, API key, OAuth — all worked
- Request bodies: clean across formats
No reconfiguration needed.
That’s rare.
What Broke
Our auth flow depends on a collection-level pre-request script (~40 lines).
It imported fine.
It didn’t run correctly.
pm.sendRequest() behaves slightly differently, and the error callback failed silently.
Result:
- Tokens didn’t refresh
- Requests returned 401
- Looked like a backend issue
Fix
- 5 lines changed
- Time to find: 15 minutes
The dangerous bugs aren’t big — they’re the ones that look unrelated.
If you use collection-level scripts, test them separately.
The Git Sync Adjustment
This was the uncomfortable part.
Week 1: Merge conflicts. Friction. Regret.
Week 2: It clicked.
- API changes showed up in pull requests
- New devs got full setup by cloning the repo
- No invites, no workspace access issues
What felt wrong early became the most useful part later.
What It Cost
Not money — time.
- Evaluation: about half a day (~12 hours across the team)
- Import and initial testing: ~2 hours
- Debugging the script issue: another ~2 hours
- Adjusting to the new workflow: about a week of small frictions
All in, the migration took roughly 8–10 hours of focused work, plus a week to feel natural.
Saved: ~$912/year
New cost: $0
If You’re Doing This
- Export in v2.1
- Write your checklist before starting
- Test scripts explicitly
- Give Git sync 2 weeks, not 2 days
Where We Landed
Migration done. No major breakage.
The real signal:
Priya hasn’t complained once.
That’s usually how we know something actually works.
Next: Three months later — what held up, what didn’t, and what we’d change.
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