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Karve

For engineering teams

Your team already has a sync layer. It's called Git.

Nobody needs another workspace to invite people into. In Karve, a request is a .http file in your repository, shared the moment you push, reviewed in the pull request, and versioned with the code it tests.

Karve is a single-user Windows app, deliberately. There are no seats to administer, no shared cloud copy of your API surface, and no renewal date. Each developer buys it once.

Talk to us about your team

Tell us your headcount and we'll sort out licensing and invoicing for the group. Just evaluating? Start a free 15-day trial. No card, no account.

What brought you here?

“Renewal is up, and I have to justify a yearly bill for twelve people.”

Run the seat math

“Security won't approve another cloud vendor holding our endpoints.”

Get the review answers

“Half the shared collection is stale and nobody knows which copy is right.”

See the review flow

How a team actually shares requests

1

The requests go in the repository

Beside the service they call, committed like any other source file. There is no import step and no collection to publish. The folder is the collection. 

payments-service/
├── api/
│   ├── auth.http           ← committed, reviewed, diffed
│   ├── payments.http       ← committed
│   └── health.http         ← committed
├── .env.example            ← committed: the contract, no real values
├── .env                    ← git-ignored: each developer's own secrets
└── .gitignore
2

The secrets don't

One .gitignore line does the whole split. The committed .env.example is the contract. It tells a teammate which keys to fill in without handing them a single real value.

.gitignore

.env
.env.local

.env.example

baseUrl=https://staging.example.com
apiToken=

The committed request references values by name, never by value, so it is safe to review in public and to keep forever: 

### Charge a card
POST {{baseUrl}}/v1/payments
Authorization: Bearer {{apiToken}}
Content-Type: application/json

{ "amount": 1250, "currency": "eur" }

Nobody ever pastes a production token into a shared workspace, because there is no shared workspace to paste it into. See environments and variables for the resolution rules.

3

A clone is the whole onboarding

A new developer clones the repo, opens the folder in Karve, copies .env.example to .env, fills in their own values, and runs. No invite to send, no workspace to join, no seat to assign. Their Git access already decided what they can see.

Karve can also gather api/ folders from several repositories into one workspace without moving or copying the originals, which helps when your team owns eight services and one of them is the one you're debugging. For the repository layout in more depth, see storing API requests in Git.

Review changes. Don't sync them.

A shared cloud collection is a live database that everyone can edit and nobody reviews. When a teammate repoints staging or drops a required header, the change lands in your client silently, and the only way to find out is that your request stopped working.

A .http file cannot change under you. It changes in a pull request, with a diff, an author, and an approver: 

  ### Charge a card
- POST https://staging-old.example.com/v1/payments
+ POST {{baseUrl}}/v1/payments
+ Idempotency-Key: {{requestId}}

Who changed it?

git blame

Why did it change?

The pull request that shipped it

Undo it?

git revert

Requests stay correct for the same reason your code does: they're versioned with the thing they describe. Check out a release branch and you get the requests as they were on that branch, not today's copy of a workspace that has moved on.

Getting it past security and finance

Answers in a form you can paste straight into a review ticket. All of it is verifiable on the privacy page.

For the security review

  • No vendor account, sign-in, or user directory. Nothing to breach and nothing to deprovision.
  • No cloud copy of your endpoints, tokens, or schemas. Request files stay on the disk you put them on.
  • Request and response history is a local SQLite database on each machine, never uploaded.
  • Distributed as a signed MSIX through the Microsoft Store, so updates follow your existing Windows app policy.
  • The MCP server for AI agents is off by default, binds to localhost only, and exposes variable names. An agent sees {{apiToken}}, never the value.

One exception: Karve sends anonymous crash diagnostics to Sentry, covering exception type, stack trace, and app and OS version. Crash reports never contain request URLs, headers, query parameters, tokens, or bodies.

For finance

  • One-time purchase per developer. There is no renewal to budget for next year.
  • No per-seat metering, no usage tiers, no request quotas that surprise you mid-quarter.
  • Headcount changes don't change the bill. Adding a developer is one purchase, not a plan upgrade.
  • A 15-day trial per developer means the evaluation costs nothing.

Expense line to paste

“Karve — native Windows API client, one-time perpetual licence per developer, purchased through the Microsoft Store. Replaces recurring per-seat API client subscriptions.”

What Karve does not do for teams

Worth knowing before you roll it out. If your team needs anything on this list, buy a platform instead. Karve covers the local half of the workflow.

No shared cloud workspace. No realtime collaboration, comments, or mentions. A hosted workspace to log into is not planned.

No admin console. No SSO, SCIM, audit logs, or role-based permissions.

No CLI or CI runner. Run the same files in CI with ijhttp or httpyac.

REST over HTTP only. No GraphQL, gRPC, or WebSocket.

Windows only. There is no macOS or Linux build for the rest of the team.

Planned: a workspace file you commit

Today each developer arranges their own view of which .http files belong together. A planned source-controllable workspace file puts that arrangement in the repo too, reviewed in a pull request and versioned like everything else, so a clone brings the layout with it. It is a file you commit, not a workspace you log into.

The seat math

Per seat, per year, forever — or once.

Yearly prices as listed on our comparison pages.

Subscription total

$3,240

vs $300 once for Karve

You keep $2,940

List price. Ask us about five or more seats.

FAQ

Does Karve have team workspaces?
No. Karve is a single-user tool with no shared cloud workspace, realtime collaboration, or comments. Requests are plain .http files, so your team shares and reviews them through its normal Git workflow. A source-controllable workspace file, which records how those files are arranged and gets committed to the repo like any other file, is planned for a future version. A hosted workspace to log into is not planned.

How do we buy Karve for a whole team?
For five or more developers, email us with your seat count and billing details and we'll arrange licensing and a single invoice for the group. Below that, each developer buys from the Microsoft Store and expenses it. Either way it's a one-time purchase per developer with no renewal, and everyone can evaluate on the free trial first.

Do our developers need to create accounts?
There is no Karve account, sign-in, or team directory to provision. A Microsoft account is required to install any app from the Microsoft Store, the same account your developers already use on Windows.

Does anything leave our network?
No request content. Files stay on disk, and history is a local SQLite database on each machine. Besides the HTTP requests a developer explicitly runs, the only data sent off-device is anonymous crash diagnostics to Sentry, which never include URLs, headers, tokens, or bodies. See our privacy policy.

Does Karve support SSO, SCIM, or an admin console?
No. There is no account layer to federate, provision, or administer. Access to the requests themselves is governed by your Git repository permissions.

Can we run these .http files in CI?
Not with Karve, which has no command-line runner. The same files run in CI with open-source tools such as ijhttp or httpyac. Karve covers the local editing and debugging loop; CI runs the committed files unchanged.

What happens when a developer leaves?
Nothing has to be deprovisioned. There's no seat to reclaim, no workspace access to revoke, and no copy of your API surface sitting in a vendor cloud. The requests live in your repository and stay with the team, so their replacement clones it and carries on.

Weigh it against a platform on the Postman comparison, read how it fits .NET repositories, or check the local-first case before you take it to security.

Five or more developers

Tell us your headcount. We'll handle the rest.

One invoice for the group, so your developers don't each have to expense it. Send the number of seats and your billing details, and we'll come back with licensing and a quote. A real person answers. There is no sales sequence waiting on the other end.

Email team@karve.dev

Fewer than five, or just want to try it first? Skip the email and buy from the Microsoft Store instead. 15-day free trial, one-time charge, no account.