I spend most of my day job writing backend services in Go, wiring up gRPC/Protobuf between microservices at a fintech company in Jakarta. Which means I spend a stupid amount of time in an API client, poking endpoints, checking responses, debugging auth headers.
For years that meant Postman. Then Postman started feeling like it was actively working against me: forced cloud login just to save a collection locally, a UI that got heavier every release, and a memory footprint that made my laptop fan spin up just for sending a GET request. I tried Insomnia, better for a while, then Kong bought it and the trajectory started looking familiar. I also spent a good while with Electron-based alternatives that get the git-native storage idea right, but the RAM usage problem never actually went away, it just moved to a different logo.
At some point I stopped complaining and just started building the thing I actually wanted.
What I Actually Wanted
Nothing fancy. Just:
- Fast, native networking. Not a browser sandbox pretending to be a native app.
- Collections as plain files, not one giant JSON blob you can't diff or merge.
- Something that doesn't eat hundreds of MBs of RAM to show me a response body. So I built Relay, a desktop API client built on Tauri v2, Rust, and React.
The Native Networking Part
Requests run through actual Rust (reqwest/tonic), not a webview's fetch(). No CORS restrictions, real gRPC support, and no Electron/Chromium runtime bundled in, so the installer size and memory footprint are a fraction of the usual.
Relay also has a built-in Performance tab, so you can watch memory and request timing yourself instead of taking my word for it.
The Git-Native Part
This is the part I'm most opinionated about. Every request, folder, and environment is a plain-text .relay file, not one giant JSON blob.
That means:
-
git diffactually shows what changed - Merge conflicts are readable
- Secrets auto-split into a
.gitignored file, so they never end up in your commit history
What Else Is In There
- Auth tab: Bearer, Basic, AWS SigV4, OAuth2
- gRPC support, via reflection or imported
.protofiles - Runner + CLI for CI pipelines
- Mock server
- Contract check against OpenAPI specs
It's Open Source
MIT licensed.
Repo: https://github.com/justirva09/relay
Would love feedback, bug reports, or just war stories about your own Postman-fatigue. ⭐ on GitHub always appreciated if you find it useful.
Top comments (1)
"Secrets auto-split into a .gitignored file" is the line I'd have led with, and it's your third sub-bullet. Anyone who has committed a Postman export with a live bearer token in it will read that sentence and stop scrolling. The Performance tab is the other one - shipping the thing that lets people check your memory claim themselves is a better argument than the claim.
Wrote you a launch post, free, use it or bin it:
"Relay is a native API client built on Tauri v2, Rust and React. Requests run through reqwest and tonic rather than a webview's fetch, so there's no CORS sandbox and gRPC is real - by reflection or your own .proto files. Every request, folder and environment is a plain-text file, so git diff shows what actually changed and merge conflicts are readable, and secrets split out into a gitignored file so they never reach your history. Bearer, Basic, AWS SigV4 and OAuth2. Runner and CLI for CI, a mock server, and contract checks against OpenAPI. MIT."
Full disclosure so it isn't strange: I build a tool that writes these. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to click - the post is yours either way.