Postdot Technologies Inc., maker of the Postman application program interface development environment, is dropping license fees for many of its collaboration features, including teams, team workspaces and the development and debugging toolset.

Previously, teams-related features were available exclusively to paying users of the company’s Pro and Enterprise plans, which start at $8 per user per month.

The company isn’t giving away the store, though. The free edition, announced late last week, is limited to small projects. The new freemium model is intended to entice developers to begin using the team version and then upgrade to a paid license when they start hitting workflow limits.

“You can create as many team workspaces as you want, invite as many of your colleagues to your team as you’d like and collaborate for as long as you want,” a spokeswoman said. The free edition limits the the number of shared requests and shared history requests to 25, beyond which requests are archived to make room for new ones.

The Pro edition removes those limitations and the Enterprise version, which is priced at $18 per user per month, adds a number of unique features, including single sign-on support, audit logs and priority technical support.

Postman’s product was originally built as a graphical user interface-based browser plugin replacement for the command-line Curl data transfer tool. The company claims its free edition is now the most popular API tool in the world, with 5 million developers in more than 100,000 companies. The toolset, which includes features for design/mockup, debugging, automated testing, publishing, monitoring and documentation, has been expanded to run natively on Macintosh, Windows and Linux platforms as well as in a browser. The Pro edition was introduced in 2016 and the Enterprise version earlier this year.

The new version also adds Sessions, a feature that enables teams to work more effectively through the addition of session-specific collection, environment and global variables. Session variables aren’t synced to the cloud, meaning developers can work securely with sensitive information. All versions can be downloaded from the company’s website.

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