Levelbrook Developer Tools

Sendpad

Point it at your existing .http files. Everything works.

VS Code extension Available now — direct download levelbrook.sendpad v1.0.0

Status — Sendpad 1.0.0

Built, tested and packaged as a .vsix, and you can download and install it right now from this page. It is not on the VS Code Marketplace or Open VSX yet — that listing is pending a publisher account, and nothing about it changes the software you get here.

Download .vsix (111 KB)

Install it with Extensions: Install from VSIX… from the VS Code command palette (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + P), or from a terminal with code --install-extension sendpad-1.0.0.vsix. It works the same way in Cursor, Windsurf and VSCodium.

Point it at your existing files. Everything works.

Sendpad reads the same .http and .rest files you already have. No import step, no conversion, no workspace-specific format, no account.

@baseUrl = https://api.example.com

### Log in
# @name login
POST {{baseUrl}}/auth/login
Content-Type: application/json

{ "user": "demo", "pass": "demo" }

### Use the token from the response above
GET {{baseUrl}}/me
Authorization: Bearer {{login.response.body.$.token}}

Why this exists

The .http client most VS Code developers use has 7.5 million installs and a 4.91★ rating, and it has been unmaintained since 2022. The best-known successor took a 2.39★ rating — the worst in our whole survey of the category — for paywalling features that used to be free. Its users' own word for it was “rug pull”.

Sendpad exists because that file format deserves a maintained client that does not do either of those things.

Free, forever

  • Full .http / .rest compatibility — every method including WebDAV verbs, headers, bodies, ### separators, # @name handles, file variables, prompt variables and environments.
  • Multi-line URLs, folded headers, < ./file bodies, <@ ./file with variable interpolation, and system variables such as {{$guid}}, {{$timestamp -1 d}} and {{$randomInt 1 100}}.
  • Request chaining that works properly — reference an earlier response body, header or status by name.
  • Editor integration — a real TextMate grammar with embedded JSON, CodeLens, completion and a document outline.
  • A real response panel — status, size and a timing breakdown (DNS / TCP / TLS / first byte).
  • Redirects with correct 301/302/303/307/308 method semantics, a cookie jar, proxies and client certificates.
  • Copy as cURL and code generation for 13 targets.
  • Save the response to a file, or open the full response in an editor.

https://localhost actually works

Self-signed certificates on a local dev server are the single most reported failure of the incumbent. Sendpad handles them, per host, without asking you to disable TLS verification globally.

One deliberate divergence, documented rather than hidden

Comment lines are stripped from the metadata and header region only; request bodies pass through byte for byte. The incumbent strips # and // lines from bodies too, which silently mangles any body that is a shell script, YAML, Markdown or JSONC. A ### at the start of a line still ends a request.

Pro

Free versus Pro
Feature Free Pro
.http / .rest files, all verbs, all variablesYesYes
Request chaining, environments, .envYesYes
Syntax highlighting, CodeLens, completion, outlineYesYes
Cookie jar, redirects, proxies, client certificatesYesYes
Self-signed / localhost HTTPSYesYes
Copy as cURL, 13-language code generationYesYes
Save response, open full responseYesYes
Test assertions — > {% client.test(…) %}—Yes
Suite runner — run a file or a whole folder—Yes
JUnit XML export for CI—Yes
OpenAPI / Swagger import to a ready-to-run .http file—Yes
cURL import, Postman import and export—Yes
Secret storage — {{$secret NAME}} in your OS keychain—Yes

Every row above the divider stays free forever. The scripting API for assertions is deliberately the IntelliJ HTTP Client one, so files written for IntelliJ run here unchanged.

Free

$0 · permanent

Not a trial. Not a countdown. The free tier listed above never moves behind a paywall — that is the whole point of the pledge.

Read the pledge

Pro — lifetime

$49 once

  • Every Pro feature, on every machine you own
  • One year of updates included; the version you bought keeps working forever
  • No account and no email address required to use it
Buy Sendpad Pro — $49 once

Pro — monthly

$6 / month

  • The same Pro feature set
  • Cancel at any time from the Stripe receipt
Subscribe — $6/month

A 14-day trial starts the first time you use a Pro feature. No account, no email address, no card and no request to any server. Payment is handled by Stripe; we never see your card details. Your entitlement is an Ed25519-signed token that is verified offline, so Pro keeps working when you do not have a network.

Already bought it and lost the key? Recover your licence key.

No telemetry. None.

Sendpad makes exactly the HTTP requests you write in your files, plus one more if — and only if — you personally enter a Pro licence key. There is no analytics, no crash reporting and no usage ping, so there is no setting to turn any of it off.

What is not in 1.0

Named here rather than discovered later. GraphQL schema introspection and field completion are not implemented — GraphQL requests work fully, but there is no schema-aware completion. gRPC, WebSocket and SSE request types are not implemented. Neither is advertised anywhere in the product. Azure AD ({{$aadToken}}) is unsupported; it falls through as an unresolved variable rather than failing silently. These are the 1.1 candidates.