ABOUT
Why “Rostyman”?
A short story about the name, the idea behind it, and the philosophy that shows up in every corner of the app.
The name
Why “Rostyman”.
A roastis what a good friend does — tells you the truth about your work, cuts through the noise, points at the stuff you’d rather not see. A really good roast makes the work better.
That’s what a good API client should do, too. Not just send requests and show you JSON — but give your API the honest once-over it deserves.
- Tell you when your response time is drifting
- Spot the auth header you forgot
- Catch the schema violation before production does
- Flag the 500 you would have missed in a rush
Like a roast — but for endpoints.
The flame
The icon is a stylized flame because that's what a roast is — gentle fire, applied with intent. It's warm, it's inviting, and it's dangerous if you point it the wrong way. The orange-to-red gradient carries through the whole app.
The idea
Four beliefs that show up in every feature we ship.
Own your tools
Your API client is as central to your workflow as your editor. It shouldn’t live on someone else’s server, cost per-user-per-month, or lock you into a proprietary format. It should be yours — a local tool, yours to keep, yours to export, yours to fork if it comes to that.
Take privacy seriously
Your API test collection is a map of your entire system. Endpoint URLs, auth tokens, example payloads with real data. That deserves encryption, local-only storage, and an honest disclosure of what (if anything) ever leaves your machine.
Be honest about trade-offs
We’re v1.0 and still growing. Some things the mature tools do better than us right now — and we say so plainly instead of hiding it. We’d rather lose a user to a fair comparison than win one on a half-truth.
Build for developers first
No growth dark patterns. No account-required fences around the free features. No surprise paywalls on protocols you expected to work. The kind of tool we wanted when we started building our own APIs, ten years ago.
The team
We're a small team that spent years building and operating APIs across time zones, through spotty hotel Wi-Fi, with teammates we rarely see in person. Every design decision in Rostyman started with a specific moment when our previous tools let us down.
That's not a tagline. The workflow editor exists because chaining four requests in a shell script was painful. The file sharing exists because Slack compressed our test data. The Vault exists because we almost pushed a Stripe key to a public repo. This is personal.