Pastebin Made It Harder to Scrape Its Site and Researchers Are Pissed Off

Also notable is that if you go to that section of their site (‘scraping API’), they don’t mention its deprecation and are still advising users upgrade to Pro to scrape.

I guess they can’t figure out how to charge enterprise clients more than the common folk or stand-alone security researchers not backed by a company. This also has the unintended consequence(or perhaps intended, since it is the source of the content people are paying for) of concealing the behavior of malicious actors. Either way, I can almost say with certainty, that I don’t think people were upgrading to Pro for any of their other features.

What's particularly bad is that they were discontinued an API that people had already paid for lifetime access to.