Postman commercial use without using Postman Cloud sync for >3 person team

Question

Postman (the company) indicates that commercial use is permitted providing you adhere to the licence according to their support statement below, however while the support statement appears on the surface to be clear it then goes on to refer to the EULA which makes the situation impossible to easily understand.

https://support.postman.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003675853-Commercial-Use-Restrictions

There are no restrictions on using the base version of Postman for commercial purposes. However,
you must still agree to, and be bound by, the Postman EULA.

For small teams of people on a project <=3 it's likely to be commercially free as the pricing plan as of 2021 indicates "All the basics for up to 3 team members" for $0. The problem is more evident when people cooperate on the same project in a 'team' but not logging in to the Postman sync facilities.

Scenario:

• If a team is >3 or more people
• If they are not using the Postman cloud (login) to synchronise API usage
• Potentially not even sharing API definitions or tests at all

Then the licence is at best vague and at worst people are in accidental breach of licence. In addition it looks as though you would need a licence for each team you're a member of, so the price isn't USD $180 per year - it's USD $180 times the number teams you're a member of. It's even legally quite clear that it's not permitted to use Postman in any way "which bypasses or defeats Postman's system controls designed to enforce team size limits.". This is directly from their EULA, point 3.3. However nowhere in the EULA is the term "Team" defined in detail, leaving it open to interpretation. "Open to interpretation" means that legally they're able to choose any definition that suits and prosecute on that basis. Not cool.

In short it appears that: Postman is not possible to be used in any way for teams of >3 people or more without payment and that a developer needs to pay for each such team they are a member of, or at least that appears to be the case from a legal standpoint.

Can someone shine any light on this? Is my reading of their statements and EULA incorrect? We're presently looking into Insomnia and Paw as alternatives given this issue. Any comments on these products are also welcomed.

• https://insomnia.rest/download and
• https://paw.cloud/

Postman themselves have ignored multiple previous requests for clarity on this, though our last query is still outstanding from them after nearly 2 weeks.

We're after thoughts from anyone with a legal background or that have hit this issue before with Postman. Loving the tool - hating the licencing legals.

Iyeyasu

Answer 1

After a month and over 15 exchanged emails back and forth I've finally received a clear answer from Postman as follows:

Postman rep: "We don't differentiate based on the sync mechanism rather with the people in the same environment"

They indicated that the following definition of "Team" is the correct one to use:

Postman Team definition:

"a Team is any group of people acting in concert on a given project or 
within a single company regardless of whether the Cloud-based sync aspects 
of the Postman tool are used"

Note that the definition above means that there are likely to be many (many) people currently using Postman in breach of the EULA. They'll be using it within a company and without logging in, thinking that they're not in breach. In actuality they are required to pay the (quite large) fees for it in this usage model.

Iyeyasu