Gregory Schier

Gregory Schier is a Canadian indie developer best known for creating Insomnia, the API client he sold to Kong in 2019, and Yaak, the offline, open-source and Git-friendly API client he now builds full-time.

Schier started Insomnia in 2014 as a side project for testing HTTP APIs. It grew into one of the most popular REST clients among developers, and he worked on it alone for years. By his own account he took it to about $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue before selling it to Kong in July 2019. He stayed on to help get Insomnia back on its feet, but on August 31, 2020 he left to go indie again, writing that he had been burnt out and that his passion had returned, just not for Insomnia.

He began 2021 self-employed without income and soon joined Railway, the deployment platform, after its founder noticed they were building similar things. He kept side projects going, including Kabook, a book tracker and reading log for iPhone, iPad and Android.

After Insomnia moved in a direction he no longer agreed with, Schier started Yaak as a side project and released it around the end of 2023. In May 2024, five months after his first child was born and with Yaak at about 200 daily active users, he left Railway to work on it full-time, describing the goal as a lifestyle business that trades money for time with family.

Yaak is built with Rust and Tauri, supports REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket and SSE, stores requests as plain files that can be versioned with Git, and comes with an agent-friendly CLI. It is MIT-licensed, free for personal use, and sells commercial licenses to people and teams who use it at work. The GitHub repository has passed 19,000 stars. Schier also runs smaller projects such as Pakratt, a packing-list app, and Platform Pixels, a small platformer game.

His career is a rare full loop: build a beloved dev tool, sell it, take a job, and come back to build a better version on his own terms.