Yaak

What makes it different

Yaak is a local-only desktop API client — REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, SSE and gRPC — with 100% of its features open source under the MIT license, requests stored on your machine and versioned with Git.

Founder Gregory Schier previously built Insomnia, the API client he sold in 2019; Yaak is its spiritual successor. After quitting his job in 2024 to go full-time on Yaak and two years living off savings, he invented a novel model: the source is free forever, and people pay only for commercial use of the official prebuilt binaries. It just crossed $5K MRR — 37 business and 421 individual subscriptions, with businesses contributing two-thirds of recurring revenue — enough to cover costs and keep every feature open source.

Personal use is free either way: anyone can build the app themselves for free, even for paid work. The license relies on commercial users following the terms — and on companies preferring official builds and automatic updates over maintaining their own.

The playbook, in their own words

• Quit his job in 2024 to go full-time on Yaak; spent two years living off savings before the model worked source ↗
• Novel monetization: MIT-licensed source free forever; charges only for commercial use of prebuilt binaries — 37 business + 421 individual subs source ↗
• Businesses contribute $3,247 of ~$5K MRR despite being a small share of subscribers — the largest business account is ~80 seats source ↗
• Previously built Insomnia, sold in 2019; Yaak is its spiritual successor — he chose local-first after cloud sync contributed to his burnout source ↗