Image: Request Eagle
Why it mattersA team that opens an API client dozens of times a day gets a native tool with no account, no cloud sync, request files in git, and a CLI an AI agent can call.
Postman takes just over four seconds to open and asks you to sign in before the first GET. Request Eagle, released on Product Hunt today by Gregor Tokarev, is a free, dual-licensed desktop API client that opens in a third of a second and never asks for an account.
The app is written in Rust and rendered on the GPU, with no embedded web view. It runs on Apple Silicon Macs, Windows 10 and 11 on x64, and Debian 12 or Ubuntu 22.04 and newer. The source is at gregor-tokarev/request-eagle on GitHub under MIT or Apache-2.0, user's choice, and the latest tag at the time of this item is v0.1.29, published on 8 October.
The speed claim, as the author measured it
The front page states 0.36 seconds to open against Postman's 4.3 seconds, twelve times as long. The author describes the test on his own page: a MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro, five launches each, median taken, 60 frames per second screen capture to count the first drawable frame. Those are the author's own numbers on his own hardware, and no third party has verified them. The design choice behind the figure is that the app loads nothing from the network at startup and holds no account state at all, so a cold open is a local process starting rather than a sign-in flow completing.
No account, files in git, scripts a Postman user already knows
Requests are stored as TOML files in a folder the user picks, so a team can commit its collections into the same repository the API lives in. Branches, pull requests and reviews work the way they do for the rest of the code, instead of living inside a vendor's workspace and leaving on export. Variables use the Postman syntax, including {{$guid}} and other generated values, and pre-request and post-response scripts call the same pm.* API, so a collection moved across keeps working.
The editor supports Vim mode. gRPC and WebSocket are built in. Eleven theme families ship with the app. The repository counts 634 commits on main, so the author has been running this project for months before the Product Hunt launch.
A CLI an agent can call
Request Eagle also ships a request-eagle-cli binary for each supported platform, which runs a saved request from the terminal and prints the response. The project describes it as optional and aimed at AI agents: a coding agent can be told to send one of your stored requests the same way a human would open the app and press send, with the response coming back as text the agent can read. The agent's call is a known request from your collection, with your variables and scripts, so the team controls the shape of the HTTP traffic the agent produces.
The project is open about the state. The front page says Request Eagle "is in early development" and the issues tracker on GitHub was empty at the time of this item, which means a team that adopts it today is one of the first to find rough edges. The trade is that the files stay yours, with no monthly bill and no vendor between the team and the API.
Source
Request Eagle is on GitHub under MIT or Apache-2.0, and launched on Product Hunt.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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