insomnia-plugin-response-budget

Local-only response budget reports for Insomnia. Response Budget catches oversized and overly complex API responses before they become frontend performance problems.

Why

APIs often become slow because responses grow quietly: huge arrays, deeply nested JSON, base64 blobs, logs, or expanded includes. Insomnia can show the response, but it does not explain whether the payload is healthy. This plugin turns a response body into a local budget report with fix ideas.

Features

• Measures response byte size, characters, and lines
• Parses JSON when possible
• Reports JSON max depth
• Reports largest array length
• Reports JSON node count / complexity
• Reports largest object key count and string length
• Warns on oversized responses after a response hook
• Exports a local Markdown report
• Works without accounts, cloud, telemetry, or dependencies

Install

From Insomnia:

1. Open Preferences → Plugins
2. Enter insomnia-plugin-response-budget
3. Click Install Plugin

Manual macOS install:

cd "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Insomnia/plugins"
npm install insomnia-plugin-response-budget

Linux plugin path:

~/.config/Insomnia/plugins/

Windows plugin path:

%APPDATA%\Insomnia\plugins\

Usage

Send a request. If the response breaks the default budget, the plugin shows a local warning.

To export a report, run:

Response Budget: Export Report

The action is exposed through:

• workspaceActions
• requestGroupActions
• requestActions

In Insomnia 13, this may appear in the New Request dropdown or request/folder action menus.

Default budgets

maxBytes: 102400
maxJsonDepth: 8
maxArrayLength: 500
maxNodeCount: 5000
maxStringLength: 10000

Example report

# Insomnia Response Budget Report

## Summary

- Budget result: fail
- Quality score: 35/100
- Body size: 210 KB (215040 bytes)
- JSON parsed: yes

## Findings

| Severity | Type | Message | Value | Limit | Fix |
|---|---|---|---:|---:|---|
| high | response-too-large | Response body exceeds byte budget. | 215040 | 102400 | Paginate, filter fields, compress, or move bulk data behind a download endpoint. |
| medium | array-too-large | Largest JSON array exceeds length budget. | 900 | 500 | Add pagination, cursors, or server-side limits. |

Privacy

Response Budget is local-only.

• No backend
• No telemetry
• No accounts
• No credentials
• No dependencies
• Local Markdown export only

Development

git clone https://github.com/oliviajohns5/insomnia-plugin-response-budget.git
cd insomnia-plugin-response-budget
npm test
npm run test:hard
npm run test:packaged
npm pack --dry-run

Verified QA

• node --check main.js
• node --check test.js
• node --check hard-qa.js
• node --check real-insomnia-packaged-test.js
• node --check qa-packaged.js
• npm test
• npm run test:hard
• npm run test:packaged
• npm pack --dry-run
• isolated tarball install
• package metadata validation
• credential literal scan

License

MIT