The Lens

By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.

Updated Mar 2026

Thunder Client is an HTTP client that lives in your editor's sidebar. Send requests, inspect responses, organize them into collections, like Postman but without opening another application. For developers who spend their day in VS Code, that integration matters more than you'd think.

The free version covers the basics: send requests, save collections locally, environment variables, and basic scripting. It's fast, lightweight, and doesn't need an account to use.

The paid tier at $10/mo (or $8.33/mo billed annually at $100/yr) adds Git sync for collections, team collaboration, CI/CD integration, and advanced scripting. There's also a per-seat Team plan. Bruno is the best open source alternative: offline-first, stores collections as files in your repo, no account needed ever. Hoppscotch is another strong free option with a modern web UI. If you're deep in the Postman ecosystem already, the switching cost may not be worth it. But if you're starting fresh and live in VS Code, Thunder Client's integration is hard to beat.

The catch: the free tier has gotten more restrictive over time. Features that were once free are now behind the paywall. Collection storage limits apply on free. And unlike Postman's massive ecosystem, Thunder Client's scripting and testing capabilities are more limited. If you outgrow it, you're migrating collections.