After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
observationalhazard.com
observationalhazard.com
The email also arrived in my spam folder, so I was lucky to even see it. Once I got back to them they did increase the cutoff by a few days but it has since been stopped.
Their new prices seemed insane to me.
I call this the "going out of business sale".
Some background is required first. Travelocity was the first online travel agency (OTA). I believe they started around 1996.
Through most of its life at that point all, I mean 95%+, of its success came from only two factors: best marketing in industry and growth of the internet. This is severely problematic because marketing only gets you so far in business. Conversely Expedia had really shitty marketing in comparison and yet came to dominate the industry because they were extremely aggressive at growing their supplier relations.
You cannot EVER rely on growth of media adoption, like mom and pop coming online, because once that stops you have no fuel left in the tank. Reliance on growth of a media platform is like a gravy train that you did nothing to build and returns amazing wealth if you are in the right place at the right time, but once it stagnates its like your train derails and everybody dies. That is because everybody expects growth to continue, except you did nothing to earn the growth and now have no answers and nothing to show for it. This was around later 2008 when I joined the company and became unavoidably obvious to everybody over the next year.
So, at that point what do you do? You competitors are far out pacing you by ignoring fun stuff, marketing, technology, and all the other bullshit that technology people look to. Instead they are focusing on core business principles and eating your golden goose while laughing at you. So, what do you do?
In the case of Travelocity all the executives leave. New executives come into trying to figure out what to do. Like every great web business they focus more aggressively on marketing and advertising. This was Travelocity's death spiral.
You have to understand that people DO NOT like advertisements. Really, I know its surprising, but when your site becomes littered with advertisements everywhere and all kinds of hidden telemetry people will leave and never come back. Your wonderful palace has become a trailer park.
The business loves advertising. Revenue from advertisements is immediate. That is really significant. In e-commerce there is a massive lag between each stage of profit, revenue, and sales because you have to account for the cost of operations, sales, and inventory. The more expensive the product the longer the lag and that lag really complicates projections. So advertisements are like cocaine, because they immediately return profit that requires no effort while rotting your health slowly until you are a hollow skeleton.
To be fair they were doing amazing things with inventory and pricing that was vastly superior to what the competition was doing after the leadership turn over. This was too little too late though. These innovations could have saved the business provided more time and the same level of discipline, but not when you are already in a death spiral.
My learning from this is that a business that earns profit from selling something directly should not fuck up conversion or go out of its way to make customers hate them. When I put that way it sounds obvious, but web business get that wrong all the time because they get distracted by shiny things.
I am curious what these amazing things were.
The real interest in the travel agency business is on hotel inventory. This is how Expedia came to dominate the industry, because they aggressively hired geographically focused hotel relationship personnel and Travelocity wasn't keeping up. So Expedia had much greater inventory from various different properties and stronger relationships with those properties for their business prioritization. Hotels, typically hate dealing with OTAs, because OTAs are a transparent barrier between the hotel and the guest staying at the hotel, but the OTAs bring people to the properties. The name of the game for hotels is "heads in beds" and while up-selling is beneficial if you get the "heads in beds" part wrong you cannot exist.
The margin on hotel properties is much higher and highly variable. Hotels in many cases will even eat the cost of airfare to get heads in beds if the pricing is right. That provides a huge opportunity for a marriage between smart hotel systems and OTAs because the hotels are doing the smarter inventory management and the OTAs are supplying the airfare volume and customers to populate that smart inventory management. The hotel data systems, Property Management Systems (PMS), were at that time much smarter than the inventory availability OTAs had, because they had to do much more to account for seasonal volume planning and various customer demands.
Where Travelocity was strong was in writing algorithms to account for these considerations and offer volume pricing discounts the competition could not and also air + hotel package pricing at massive discounts the competition could not compete with. In parallel Travelocity was slowly building up a corporate travel business to take advantage of that volume pricing intelligence and at one point had both WalMart and Lockheed-Martin as customers.
Again, both of those were amazing and could have really helped retake lost market, but conquering competition is a fragile slow process while advertising is immediate.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/YELP/yelp/net-inco...
Been going sideways for a decade now though:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/YELP/yelp/market-c...
Next you’ll tell me that they’re NOT actually experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes!
I'm curious to what they compare this. The non-existent free plan where everything higher than 0 is unusual. Or a large mass of dead accounts who have really zero to none usage. Or the actually paying account who are now on their enterprise plan. In the later case, this might indicate some real problem if their usage is low enough that smaller projects are already exceptional.
They never answered my question about the discrepancy between these prices and the prices on their website. Both would be too high to make Restaurants low sales sustainable.
That said, I'll say again that they were perfectly in their right to start charging for their API. They just should not have done so with 4-days notice and with such a threatening email.
"2. CHANGES Yelp reserves the right to modify the API Agreement at any time. If Yelp reasonably determines that a modification may materially and adversely impact You, Yelp will provide email notice to you using the email address you provided during registration no less than ten (10) days prior to the material adverse modification taking affect. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND TO ANY NEW OR MODIFIED TERMS, YOU MUST TERMINATE THE API AGREEMENT BY CEASING USE OF THE API WITHIN TEN (10) DAYS OF RECEIPT OF SUCH NOTICE."
So, the 4-days would have violated their original notification terms of use anyway. I think they realized this after the fact of sending all of us the threatening emails and this is why they ultimately closed my API key after 10-days as described in my original post.
Anyway, just an interesting aside that the poorly written, inaccurate original email that I shared in my original post was even inaccurate to their own policies.
We have all now been reminded that RESERVED RIGHTS can and will be used against you maliciously. And if you want protection from such malice, there needs to be a RIGHTS of the USER clause.
This should be handled and enforced by government statutes.
(It is an amazing world we live in where rights of the user have to be expressed.)
How very generous of them.
Real lesson here is to avoid single points of failure, regardless if it's API, people or partners. Ask yourself a question if there's a single entity that can kill your business and remove that reliance.
Google used to need Search in order to learn about the intimate details of our lives. It's how they knew what we were interested in, what our medical problems were, what we were learning, and what we were thinking about.
Now they have chrome giving google people's entire browsing history, android devices collecting realtime data on what people are doing offline, where they are and who they are with. Google also has products like fitbit, nest, and gmail that gather still more data for google. Google doesn't need Search to spy on us anymore, so they haven't invested in keeping it useful.
In fact, it's better for google if you can't find what you want and have to make multiple searches for information because it gives them more chances to throw ads at you, and the harder it is for people to find websites using Search the more sites might feel like they have no choice but to pay Google to keep them at the top of the search results.
People who find Search increasingly useless though are turning to alternatives and for many people AI could end up replacing google's Search product as the first thing they turn to.
I would not count on Search staying around forever.
This keeps people developing content to please Google and running ads on Google platforms to get more traffic.
The quality of Google search lately has felt pretty meh, especially for generic topics that get hits for crummy blogspam. Google’s own AI results at the top are pretty much the thing keeping me there atm aside from inertia. My personal browser is on DDG which is fine just a tad slow comparatively
(https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/10/27/google-paid-26-billion-i...)
Most products have an expected expiration date and you can provide a useful service (that generates revenue) by building on other platforms, even if it won't last forever.
By now I missed more opportunities by having the mindset of "not relying on other people's APIs" than real changes/shutdowns would warrant this kind of caution.
There was so much hype & excitement in web2 age, about APIs & intertwingularity. Humanity was going to keep improving & iterating & crafting ever neater ideas.
Now it's all bureaucracy & lawyers arrayed to defend the cloud-keeps, moats & walls.
The user & agency of the world has been steady dimished, eroded away by ever advancing legal IP Protectionism.
In a competitive market John Doe would go to one of googles competitors. We don't have a competitive market. We have winner takes all market.
I agree, Google has swallowed up the video streaming market unfortunately.
I keep thinking back to how Vine was basically TikTok, and they threw it away.
Google made $300B last year. "billions over the long haul" is a lot of money, an unimaginable amount even, to you and I. But to Google?
No, Google made $73.795B last year. Revenue is not profit, net income is profit and what you ‘make’ as a company.
Revenue is not profit.
Companies get to write off expenses of existing
People don't
Your assets might inflate in value, but that's nothing to do with the mortgage
Second there is lots of revenue you use for "business" because you don't want to pay taxes on the profit and anyway it is giving you something you like to have.
How much of Google's revenue is used to do things for top executives and people with power in the company that is really something they (the executives) should be taxed on but is instead a business expense of google (cars, transport, 'working' vacations, security, super cool chefs preparing meals at the company...) Hard to say really because if you knew the answer it would actually be something they were taxed on. But it's not 0 - sure probably not a billion, but a couple hundred million splashed around wouldn't surprise me.
How much of Google's revenue usage is for wages and other forms of payout to executives etc. (stock) that does not get counted as profit but of course it is amounts those people want to have.
Google made $73.795B profit last year, and expensed slightly over 262B - some portion of which the people who run Google no doubt personally thought of the way we would consider profit in our day to day existence, and another portion of which were fines for things they did in getting the rest of the money.
Literally the other stuff is relevant for how remunerative the people who actually run the companies, day-to-day, feel those companies are (put in day-to-day because I got the feeling you might give me a lecture about the shareholders actually running the company)
1. I know it's revenue - the GP says The impact on google losing $10m of revenue
2. Do you think the 10m that Google would have booked from API usage would be booked as pure profit?
Google makes enough money that losing several currently non-existent revenue streams that are theoretically $10 million apiece isn’t hurting them. It’s hurting their users.
Google is all about ads - why would they give a shit about the users?
If you want competitive market in a capitalist economy, then you need very active state enforcement.
Empirically this absolutely isn't the case; the majority of listed companies have fairly low margins, especially non-tech companies, which can be trivially seen from their financial statements. A low profit margin means a competitive market (because if it wasn't a competitive market the firm could raise its prices to obtain higher margins).
Not necessarily: if prices are elastic then even a monopoly can aim for low profit margin (in percentage) in order to increase profit. What matters is how much total profit are being made, margin only matters when measuring risk.
Also, corporations are social structures, and low competition also encourage complacency in the corporate structure itself, which drives costs up and reduces profit margin.
They are now hemorrhaging search to OpenAI that popped into public existence just recently.
To claim there isn’t competition in these markets is completely ignorant. “A big player eats 80%” isn’t anything like a monopoly/duopoly scenario where there literally isn’t any competition or product advancement for decades.
If you wanna see lack of competition, look at government granted monopolies on utilities. Guaranteed but capped rates means you reduce investment right to $0 and cut costs as much as possible since there is no other way to make money. That “state enforcement” you are calling for is how you end up with PG&E and scenarios like all insurances companies pulling out of the state.
Please tell me how many “product advancement” in Google search or YouTube over the past decade… From a consumer's perspective all that happened was enshitification and despite being owned by a search engine company, YouTube never managed to ship a functional search on their platform.
> If you wanna see lack of competition, look at government granted monopolies on utilities.
Utilities are “natural monopolies” though, and as such they should be state owned. Making a natural monopoly owned for profit is a recipe for rent seeking, and that's why it was promoted …
> That “state enforcement” you are calling for
No, the state enforcement I'm calling for is proper enforcement of antitrust laws, forbidding consolidation through M&A and disbanding companies megacorps. That is to say, what existed in US's golden age.
Phew, here I was stressing out about lack of competition, but you helped me relax.
Google has to invest into Youtube lest it loses out to Twitch (Amazon), Netflix ($35bn per year), HBO Max (Warner Bros, $50bn per year), (Amazon) Prime, Plus (Disney, $90bn per year).
My faith in humanity is restored now that there are alternatives.
From other MegaCorps.
I picked well-known names as examples. There are thousands and thousands of niche providers.
Claiming that this is a competitive market is a joke.
I’d argue that, on the contrary, it seems to be all the rage lately.
As for the actual anticompetitive power of big tech, absolute crickets.
It isn't much, but I'd like to see that as a start.
no, it's not, see declining marginal utility of wealth
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishin...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility...
Provide a selection of restaurants within a 1km radius and automagically provide 3 recommendations based on my preferences.
We had multiple API providers available, Tabelog, Gurunavi and Hotpepper, all required a paid developer license. We still needed to use the Google maps API to get the user's current location though.
This was also just when Google Maps suddenly raised their API pricing. After spending a couple of weekends building a working prototype, we stopped as we couldn't justify the cost of paying multiple API providers for basically 3 guys looking to save 10 mins deciding where to get lunch.
Also, this kind of app is a common theme if you frequent meetups in Tokyo. There's always at least 1 person that has built such a thing.
I’m sure as somebody who actually built a prototype, you understand the situation better than me, but I’m curious: why would just getting the user’s lat/long require anything you’d pay for? Wouldn’t the OS or browser provide that to you?
We were just testing the abilities of the various APIs. Google was the only that provided travelling time estimates.
(The dev community thread is full of people still impacted, so I think they literally just edited our app's flags directly.)
Even tried to invoke GDPR's rights to be exempt from automatic decision making, but their privacy questions email address responds with "nope fuck off" to those.
There are often complaints here about what amounts to bean counting affecting other aspects of business. Customer service at larger scale is costly so attracts a section of very analytical leaders. They don't get, or ever prioritize, the human elements. It's only when satisfaction numbers are bad, or another exec outside of customer service takes action, that things improve.
The scale part kills the customer. You can have great support at one size. Once you grow then leadership, structure, and the culture change. These analytical leaders don't want to carry over the culture and structure because it comes at a cost. It really needs force and support from outside of customer support leadership to maintain it.
Emailed support about it on 13/07/2024.
Got back a reply on 23/07/2024:
> Our Support Team is currently experiencing high case volumes, so we are reaching out with a message to check-in and make sure you still need help!
> If you've found a solution to your problem already, there's nothing you need to do. Just ignore this message and your case will automatically close in 2 days.
Didn't see the reply until the 3rd day.
> As we have not heard from you in the last 2 days your case has been closed automatically.
Excellent customer experience.
I think people, even on HN, grossly underestimate how much customer service costs at any major company that works with the public.
Most calls to customer service are easily self-serviceable. My brother used to work for X-Box Live support, and he said over half his calls were for password resets, something people could easily do on their X-Box.
But then there's bad actors. Another significant chunk of his calls were from people complaining about being banned, and he'd see the reports of their spamming racial slurs.
Not to mention how many people try to abuse customer support in attempts to take over someone else's account.
Yeah...customer service is expensive. Even if you automate as much as you can, but offer an appeal process, that appeal process with be absolutely abused by bad actors, so that will end up automated as well.
Why get Google/YouTube's permission at all about this?
on edit: obviously I can write my own, but I am hoping for a project that has already done a bunch of things that I can extend for my needs, as writing my own would be at the point where it would be more cost benefit to purchase.
I think the hiQ Labs vs LinkedIn case is a better representation that scraping is generally allowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
Reminder that the earlier ruling was overturned, it is no longer clear whether scraping is legal or not.
(I gave you an upvote, I don't think your comment deserve to be nuked for bringing up a possible legal risk)
True, but it is an API that they can't easily deprecate on a whim.
We had a whole team dedicated to keeping up the changes vendors would make to their websites that we scraped for info. The team was called, of course, "Scrape and P(r)ay".
So, prefer regex over css selectors, and css selectors over xpath, where possible. And don't select based on nesting or position if possible.
And that lesson is don't base your business model around playing in someone else's waled garden.
Funnily, if I understood correctly, he already had that lesson with Facebook. Let's see what comes next...
Facebook broke like monthly and required random updates, sometimes documented, sometimes not. Zero support.
Twitter worker flawlessly until I hit some limits and there was no way to increase them because I didn't hit some other limits. No way they would talk to me.
Reddit just worked until I gave up.
What I learned is to never again do any business based on someone else.
Change is also a constant, and there are plenty of good companies give bad, and a few in reverse. So due diligence is an ongoing process.
That dramatically raises the price of SaaS, so I use it much less than mainstream industry practice, but much more than zero.
That's a little dramatic, don't you think?
Supply chains are a core of many (most?) businesses out there. They depend on others to get their business done. No supply -> no business.
What you probably meant is not building a business based SOLELY on irreplaceable business relationships. Unfortunately in a lot of cases involving the tech giants and little startups, there are no alternatives.
I can't find a single dependency in my serious money generating chain right now that isn't replaceable with a similar product within a few minutes or hours if necessary.
My most recent project didn't even last a full year as there was no replacement that worked for me for ChatGPT in that moment. It was built to die, a gamble essentially. I wouldn't waste my time for things like this if I didn't had the end calculated in already.
And, just in that particular case: I'm veery okay if that would be a cloud service.
I believe I am entirely in compliance with YouTube's terms and policies, but I was flagged for some bullshit as well and got the boilerplate responses. So what I decided to do was hide it for logged out users so it looked like that specific feature was entirely removed to the dudes in India that review this stuff... One year later and my fingers are crossed we don't get another audit.
To wit, there is exactly one business strategy: When you are small, be nice. When you are big, pull that ladder up behind you.
I'd add a "in venture capital and big capital" after "business strategy". When you don't have VCs or the stonk market breathing down your neck all the time, incentives massively change.
IMHO, there is only one solution left... once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust that has a clear mandate to run its companies in a way beneficial to society at large. That way the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on countless r&d experiments, VC investors have a perspective to payout, and the world gets kept from utter bullshit like API games.
If you expect the government to make a tender offer on the largest market-cap companies, they sure as heck _are_ paying for r&d indirectly. And a lot more!
> once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust
Interesting, haven't heard that one. I'll say maybe. I'd rather have Facebook not exist at all than have it be an *official* arm of the NSA
Or, perhaps more simply, The Oatmeal's Reaching People on the Internet: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
Things are starting to flip. Increasingly, people would rather have access to the raw dataset to pipe into an LLM. The question, as always, is how to control this access and charge people accordingly.
But this case seems to be funny at least (acc to your text): A YT link about the 'old, open web'. YMMD!
So now not only is AI filling the web with garbage that poisons future model development[1], it provides incentive to further close and wall off access to (user-provided!) data.
That said... I think API policies are also vestiges of a defunct idea set that prevailed circa 2009.
At that time, "twitter is a protocol." APIs and openness were going to be the new worldwideweb. Social media was going to be an ecosystem of independent apps and services with complex interactions mitigated by protocols.
YC even did an "rfs" recruiting startups to build off the twitter API.
That didn't happen, but APIs intended to enable it were already in the wild.
As API access becomes strategic again (because AI), "why do we even have this?" is likely to come up.
The reason why those free tiers went away is that AI came along. Not so much that the AI scrapers were abusing Yelp free tier[0], but that they could. And once companies realized how much money was floating around in selling data access, non-abusive free tier users went from "a cool goodwill gesture" to "freeloading parasites".
David Kopec and Restauraunts got steamrolled in a case of technological gentrification. If you're selling data access for $TOO_CHEAP_TO_METER/call to a random indie, Apple, Google, and/or Microsoft will use that as a comparable for why Yelp should charge peanuts. Or they'll just acquihire him. They need him and his app to go away because he is inconvenient to the long-term valuation plan of Yelp, an old guard Web 2.0 business that never quite became sovereign.
[0] Though, to be clear, AI scrapers are absolutely abusive in general.
He did get through to the sales rep. The responses are directly in the article. The sales rep responded within hours and showed him how to sign up for the free trial option to extend the free usage period longer while he decided.
What more would you want the rep to do?
> What more would you want the rep to do?
Not send a threatening, inaccurate email with a 4-day (1 business day Friday->Monday) deadline in the first place?
Also for the record, this was not a sales manager. This was someone in "growth" that sent the email. I guess maybe that just means "sales."
You're right it wasn't just inaccurate it was outright deceptive, trying to frame this as something specific to OP that he is responsible for rather than a change in their business applying to all API users.
Employ a shred of critical thinking and realize this app probably drives more value to Yelp than the cost to run the API, and flag it for an exception.
And yes, many companies have "customer service" like that designed to waste your time until you go away. That doesn't mean it's the only possible way.
This is a strategy, like quiet firing, to make people go away.
Rather than being up front, this is an underhanded way of making folks leave.
I'd like to see how someone can see a directly employed Google support agent / repair technician in person for support like you can with the Genius Bar.
Additionally, as far as I know, the kind of support you get calling AppleCare is unmatched by anyone else.
> Earlier this month, we sent you an email about your Yelp Fusion API usage. That email gave developers until July 23rd to contact us if they want to continue using Yelp’s data for use in their app. We realize you might need more time and are extending your free access for an additional 90 days starting today. Your access should be available now.
> We’re sorry for any inconvenience or frustration this abbreviated transition might have caused. Please respond to this email or contact us at api@yelp.com if you have any questions.
This looks like a Face/Off situation to me.
(Spoiler alert for a 1997 action movie: in Face/Off a cop surgically exchanges faces with an imprisoned villain in order to go undercover in their organization, but the villain then murders everyone who knew about the swap and steals the cop's life.)
Somebody at Yelp in 2014 knew that you had been approved to build this app. That person almost certainly no longer worked at Yelp ten years later, so the institutional knowledge of that agreement had likely been lost.
Regardless, even if it had been active for 10 months not 10 years, 4-days notice is unacceptable.
Ideally they'd have a notes field against developer apps and a robust process for recording this kind of thing - but I've worked for companies, so it doesn't surprise me at all that there's no good mechanism in place for that.
In real life, sometimes months isn't enough. On August 5, UPS will complete their API transition to OAuth based authorization after many months of process. Many of my customers haven't responded to my attempts to warn them about the change. I've resigned myself at this point to August 5 being a crazy day.
Four weeks is the statutory minimum annual leave entitlement here in New Zealand. Most people I know get more.
Don't sweat the refunds too much (unless someone is being really rude about it). Apple certainly won't.
Btw, I'm pretty sure what happened was that this conversion was planned and carried out, but nobody was assigned the responsibility to tell developers. It was clearly done last minute using the most convenient form.
Right, the biggest thing is a failure of communication. There should have been emails months ago, not 4-days (1 business day Friday->Monday) before.
If you had an actual contract, it would be a different story. Your product would still be not more than some UI to some walled garden, and nothing particularly valuable, but at least you would be officially permitted to do so.
So you basically sold something to Apple users that you don't actually own, and that is completely out of your control, and that was always in danger to just stop working suddenly.
And, on the other hand, I'm sure you've implemented a (for a hobby) decent app, and maybe you actually brought a handful of new visitors to them (which wouldn't have just used their website if your app wouldn't exist). But do you really think that at Yelp they are sitting there and just think how they can return the favor?
They basically think "well, that funny dude has now played enough". You never were a partner for them. Just what people call " useful idi*t" (sorry, but that's just the term ^^) at best. They haven't talked about you at their christmas party!
It goes both ways.
Btw, he had a contract.
> Btw, he had a contract.
Then fine, go to the court with it, end of story.
/s
Heck, in many companies I have encountered that they don't even know who is using API keys they've issued to third parties, especially over generations of systems. I am impressed that after getting email approval for an app a decade ago, Yelp still had contact details enough to let the O/P know!
None of that negates the issue of 4-days notice and Yelp shooting themselves in the foot by removing access to an app which redirects people to their website. But someone in executive management made a decision on the basis that they wanted revenue from the API overhead, wanted a slice of other people's pie and that's that.
To the O/Ps point about subscription, there was a UK food app which gave you restaurant food safety scores taken from the food safety agency "Scores on The Doors" it's gone now but I paid a few £ a year for it and never had an issue. If the Yelp pricing is sustainable at that level it's not a bad idea to pay for API access, Yelp has to pay for their servers and a portion of the API calls won't be converted to traffic. Who knows if Yelp still has a sustainable business? Maybe that API thing doesn't pay for itself? I don't know.
Which underlines what I concluded long ago: the best and most durable form of identity on the internet is rooted in the ability to pay money. Any identity that is free to create is doomed.
My first thoughts while reading the story was that their champion at Yelp quit and whoever's left didn't know/care enough about them. 10 years ago, Yelp would still be scrappy start up and there was a motivated employees willing to go outside the painted lines. Now, it's just a faceless person following orders.
Yelp was founded 20 years ago :-)
Also, I’m guessing this new API pricing policy is they way of combating data scraping to train AI.
There is little room to blame behavior like this on bad actors and not bad decision making. 10s of thousands of companies have managed to figure out combatting API abuse without shooting themselves in the foot.
You are entirely right, yet I see this train of thought happen so very often in different companies. Some of these people are a bit saner than others and actually do listen to others explaining why it is an idiotic train of thought. Others really are just see numbers in isolation and somehow refuse to look at them in context.
It sounds like the monetary stakes are pretty small, but depending on the author's desire, it might be worth doing some research and potentially going to small claims court and claiming damages for those customers that requested refunds.
Yes, the monetary stakes are too small for it to be worth it for me to pursue. I could probably dig up some old emails from 10+ years ago but it just wouldn't be worth it. Exposing this kind of bad behavior (4-days notice!) is enough.
What contract? He never entered into a contract or even exchanged consideration with Yelp for the API as far as I can tell.
Getting a green light via e-mail to use a free service is not a binding contract and does not come with any obligations.
He was using a free API that anyone could sign up for.
They did not exchange anything with him. Developing an app to use someone's free API is not an exchange of consideration.
I would never pursue anything further over this app that had about $2,000 of revenue over 10 years. That said, for the record there was consideration.
I had to go through an official approval process that required providing evidence of the app's functionality and a few emails back and forth. I think I actually sent them a prototype of it. And based on that process they decided how many daily API calls to give me. A normal free user did not receive 25,000 API calls per day. I believe if you didn't go through approval back then you got something like 1,000 per month. So there was a consideration process on their part and a determination to green light my use case.
You could argue that the indefinite API access was in exchange for writing the app (service for service), but if this were me, I probably wouldn't bother. Maybe I'd write an adversarial-interoperability backend to replace the API, or open-source the app to allow other interested parties to do so. Or maybe I'd just say "It was a nice run", and let it die.
If you care enough to send a polite email, you could say that Yelp has a prior agreement, you'd appreciate them not reneging, and if they do, you'd appreciate compensation for your labour (minus, of course, the money you made from the software). Probably won't go anywhere, but…
But at that point it’s not a question of cost, it’s a question of how much of your time and headache you want to spend. So yeah, probably not worth it
granting API access in excess of the free tier would most likely constitute something of value, but yeah - probably wouldn't bother, it would be expensive to pursue and not worth it.
> To my mind the acquiring and delivering of the [used chocolate bar] wrappers was certainly part of the consideration in these cases, and I see no good reason for drawing a distinction between these and other cases. — Lord Reid
> It is said that when received the wrappers are of no value to Nestlé’s. This I would have thought irrelevant. A contracting party can stipulate for what consideration he chooses. A peppercorn does not cease to be good consideration if it is established that the promisee does not like pepper and will throw away the corn. — Lord Somervell of Harrow
It’s understandable they went to paid. What’s not understandable is the 4 days notice and tone of the email.
I assumed that Yelp had been doing this all along and we ran above some predetermined limit, but the email we received was identical to yours. So I'm thinking that Yelp is trying its best to monetize all API users
Does yelp (or others) allow the restaurant to modify the menu/offer coupons in a dynamic way? (i.e. change multiple times per hour, update with in minutes)
thanks
but the author pointed out that it drove traffic to Yelp, and that almost certainly seems to be true.
In fact, little integration plays like this app might have been the only thing keeping Yelp sort-of alive after Google got into the game.
Killing off your bizdev partners seems incredibly short-sighted and foolish. (Also, feeding the reviews into an AI... for what, exactly? To train a model on how to write reviews? Or perhaps to detect fake reviews -- actually, that was an issue on Yelp even before AI, so it seems like it wouldn't be the best training content.)
I too used the macos App.
Looking forward to Apple Map dumping Yelp, because that combo doesn't work for me and I do not want Yelp cluttering my Apple map.
Apple has added rating systems for destinations. Amenities available at location (ie, “accepts Apple Pay”, dog/cat friendly). Maybe in the next decade Yelp integration will be phased out completely
If I look at my closest city in the UK at restaurants, nothing has been reviewed recently (2018, 2019) and it's mostly from US visitors coming here.
If this move was AI driven, like with Reddit and others, I’m starting to dislike AI more and more… at least the rent seeking end of it, which seems to be slowing killing the open internet.
SaaS can provide “open core” or better yet simply sell a hosted version of their fully open source code. If the provider fails to provide, you can fall back to self hosting.
The API equivalent would be open sourcing the data. This is the OpenStreetMap model. If the API provider fails to provide, you can fallback to the underlying data.
Well, before the SE organization tried to kill the data exports off in an attempt to commercialize it towards AI companies, but thats a whole other issue.
API access needs better terms. Like guaranteed access for X years at $Y price with Z days notice if there's a change, where Z > 3 months or so.
Imagine a landowner who allows public access to hikers using defined trails but no overnight camping. That's legal and just has to be posted. If you don't like it, don't use it.
SerpAPI is a convenient wrapper API for scraping various sites. I assume they've vetted all the legality of things. They have a YouTube API: https://serpapi.com/yelp-search-api
They claim they did: https://serpapi.com/blog/scraping-public-pages-legality/
Still they have a boilerplate ToS with some glaring mistakes:
> These Terms of Service and any separate agreements whereby we provide you Services shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of 5540 N Lamar Blvd #12, Austin, TX, 78756, United States. (sic)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.
In that case, the court found 3Taps was criminally guilty for scraping publicly available craigslist data while logged out because 3Taps knew their use was not authorized.
This person has just received an email from Yelp telling them their free usage is not authorized, so circumventing that may well be illegal, now that they've been given that sort of communication, even if it might be questionably legal for other serpapi users.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3221625
Given how many stories of greed and throwing people under the bus for money I hear nowadays, we might already be living in a dystopia.
Why should Yelp not throw you under the bus for money?
The problem was that (impersonal) you stopped understanding basic mechanisms of human interaction. For no real reason.
That was quite the assumption. They gave you access to something for free, not encouragement. I do feel bad for OP, but they weren't paying for the API, and should not have had any assumption that it would last forever because there was no contract or terms or anything. This is the risk we take by building our house on someone else's foundation.
I agree with you there was no expectation of it being free forever. I never said there was. What was unreasonable was the 4-days notice that it was coming to an end. That's just not enough time.
I am particularly disappointed by the generic "Your API usage is higher than lots of other Yelp Fusion developers" statement.
My giveback service has a tiny user-base and find it hard to believe my API usage level can be higher than average.
https://try-something-new.web.app was built a couple years ago.
This isn't unreasonable, but they absolutely should provide more than 1 business day notice.
More than that, if you aren't paying for use of that third-party API, the people who run it will not care about you, and will think nothing of shutting you down.
I think Yelp handled this poorly, and Restaurants was probably a net positive for their business -- a positive that they were getting for near-zero cost. It's a shame that companies are so short-sighted like this.
But ultimately if you build on top of someone else's platform, with no backups and no alternatives, it's not really truly your app.
Cory Doctorow is right, if you want to disrupt, or make any improvement to an existing large platform, adversarial interoperability(that is, reverse engineering) is the only way forward and has to be explicitly legalized in cases where it's a tool for progress.
My previous statement is arrogant, as it assumes developers are entitled to take any data they want and profit from it. It also puts services in a situation where harmful crawling like what is performed by some new AI actors with no experience is an expected thing. This is of course wrong, but I want to argue that had Yelp and other actors not wanted such a future, they shouldn't have tightened free access to their proper APIs where they have the ability to set ground rules and have the ability to talk to their users.
Big companies are amazingly bad at keeping track of things internally - a promise in an e-mail is easily forgotten 10 years later. But why should the user be punished for Yelps lack of control?
> if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you are at their whim.
That's the money quote, there. I avoid using third-party APIs like the plague. I have written backend aggregators and facias, to avoid having to use the API.
I Just. Will. Not. embed an opaque codeball into my app. I'm a cranky old bastard, I know, but I sleep well at night.
Then there is ongoing issues between merchants and yelp [3]
Yelp used to be a great place to find some decent place to eat in a new city. But the platform has gotten stale. Reviews are less reliable. Star rating often not useful.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-il...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/06/google-takes-on-yelp-elite...
Google search has the same issue.
The thing is, regardless of the turnover or situation, 4-days (actually 1-business day Friday->Monday) is not a reasonable timeframe to threaten to shutoff someone's API key who hasn't violated any terms of service. They have the right to do it, but it doesn't make you want to work with them in the future.
for (apiKey in apiKeys)
if (userShouldPay(apiKey))
sendCanned4DayWarningEmail(apiKey);userShouldPay(apiKey) always evaluates to True.
> The other thing this taught me is the danger of an up-front paid model for apps that depend on ongoing access to third-party services. If users were continually paying for the app, paying for Yelp’s APIs would not be as much of an issue. And I wouldn’t feel as guilty about the app being discontinued since if the fees were charged on a monthly basis, they would just end at the same time the app ceased to exist instead of facing an expectation upon purchase of “forever access.” On the other hand, how would you charge a monthly fee for an app that people are only willing to spend less than $5 for upfront?
There are apps that I like and would like to purchase, but paying e.g. 24 euros per year feels like too much. So I stick with the free version...
Sometimes this can be pretty difficult to even see. If you were a Mac shareware dev depending on VersionTracker and MacUpdate to drive downloads, with no actual marketing budget, you might not have noticed that you were implicitly relying on Apple not creating an App Store which would turn the entire ecosystem upside down.
This is one of the reasons that it’s so tough to make a business work at a small scale. In some ways, you have more flexibility than a big company, but the lack of capital means that certain events that a larger company would shrug off can totally upend everything you’re doing.
Well, yes. I think people figured that out more than 10 years ago
And business models can and do change
And by checking the pricing page, Yelp's commercial API is $15 per 1000 API calls per month. Which sounds ok?
The economics of Restaurants actually mean it wouldn't be profitable either way though. That's how low the sales are.
They're welcome to start charging for their API whatever they want, but they should give more than 4-days (Friday->Monday, 1 business day) notice.
Which they seemingly already have done anyway. Another unintended side-effect of the borderline illegal and generally immoral “AI” companies efforts to get as many data sets as possible.
At least where I am in Europe I find it incredibly outdated, showing restaurants that have closed a long long time ago and none of the new ones.
I have stopped calling the Yelp API for local listings and put up a notice on the site. It was fun while it lasted!
Off-topic, but kudos to OP for still engaging with the threads. This certainly wasn't a dump and run post. They've probably spent more time answering questions here than they did developing the app!
> if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you are at their whim.
I think you might also want to revisit your relationship with Apple Incorporated.
The good thing: You took your lesson. Maybe this time it was sufficient to actually learn sth.
Person pays for my app. That was a customer.
Person who paid for my app also later uses the Yelp website via a link for a specific review from my app. Also a customer.
Therefore shared customers.
> Sure you had some kind of informal permission at first.
I don't know why you would define it as informal. They had an official review process for deciding what apps to grant higher daily API limits. My app went through that review process 10 years ago including considering its functionality, screenshots, and I believe I even sent them a prototype back then. We had a few emails back and forth to confirm my intentions to only develop for the Mac and what I was building.
I'm sure that got lost in the corporate shuffle over 10 years but I clearly had their permission to build the app and in fact given the relatively high API limit they gave (25000 per day versus the free at that time 10 years ago I think being 1000 per month), arguably blessing.
You created this account solely to respond on this post and all of your replies are defending an ostensibly horrible business practice, which is to give your API users less than one business day of notice to switch to a different tier.
No matter how you cut it, that is simply terrible developer relations/customer service and a terrible way to run a business.
I've written thousands of tools that scrape websites and never used the apis for this reason, you can never trust the API, either because of the reliability, cost, limits imposed, etc... Nobody wants you pulling data from their site anyway, so you're back to scraping anyway, its better to start out there then to have to end up there years later for some other reason...
I think when the AI scraping funding models go away, all these APIs will magically open up again.
Yes, Yelp was a bit clumsy in handling this, but discontinuing the free API after 10 years is totally within their rights. The developer didn't even bother getting their pricing proposal, which might have been totally reasonable (or not), considering his app is paid.
Well they can do whatever timeframe they want of course. And I can write about how rude it is. 4-days (really 1-business day in the original email Friday->Monday) is not a reasonable timeframe within which to threaten to cutoff an app with real users.
Dear Yelp,
Your decision to discontinue the free API was unexpected, and it’s difficult for me to switch to the new one within the given very short 4-day timeframe. Not only is this not enough time to estimate how your new API pricing will affect my business model, but it also requires some engineering work to switch my app to the new API.
Given my 10-year history of working with Yelp, I would appreciate it if you could send me your new pricing proposal ASAP and also give me some time to consider it. If accepted, I would need additional time to implement it.
Thank you.
Also, the money is very very low stakes. This app sells dozens of copies a year. Not hundreds or thousands. It's just not worth it financially. It sold 467 copies over 10 years. People who used it loved it, but it's not a money maker.
If you don't want to deal with the slightest inconvenience don't run a business and don't take money from customers. You owe it to your users to care at least a bit.
I did care "at least a bit" which is why I kept updating the app for 10-years despite it not making almost any money. How many indie apps survive that long? But based on the pricing they quoted me it would be a money-losing venture to continue (see slide 3 base monthly fee $229 from the deck they sent me): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
And we have to decide what we work on when we are just one person. If it's money-losing and they don't treat you well it might not make sense to keep doing it.
That said, as I expressed in the blog post I do feel really bad for any of the users that bought the app and I want all of them to get a refund from Apple as explained in the post. They can use these directions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/118223
Christ on a bike, he is giving people refund and you act like he does not care at all.
Unfortunately, if you're not a paying customer with a contract they can discontinue free service whenever they want.
Frustrating? Absolutely.
No matter the rate Yelp set, the apps economics no longer make sense. The existing customers, already paid, and he has no way to transition them to a subscription.
Used to be that, coupled with competition with competing services, was the main reason sites offered APIs.
According to the article, Yelp promised him 25,000 API calls per day:
> In fact, without me specifically asking for it, they provided a 25,000 per day API call limit
If the app has outlived its lifecycle, the end of the free API might be a signal to retire it. Blaming Yelp and making a drama out of it seems a bit much. Suppose they had given him 30 days instead of 4; would his decision really be any different?
Possibly not, but the point of OP's complaint is that Yelp was rude, handled it poorly, and gave him an unreasonably short deadline. No one is arguing that Yelp doesn't have the right to discontinue free API access, or that OP's business model was a good and sustainable one.
But agreed: if OP could have gotten a rate that would have cost, say, 10 cents per day (or even more, like 50 cents or a dollar a day), maybe that would have been ok. And maybe he could have changed the pricing on the app for future purchasers to a subscription model, some small token amount like $1/mo or even $5/year.
But also consider it's pretty crappy to give someone such a short amount of time to make the decision as to whether or not that new business model would work, and if it's worth it to put more development effort into the app to enable that new pricing scheme.
Don't read it if you don't like it. Some of us actually give a fuck how badly companies are treating people, even if you don't.
The only interesting part of the story is to what extent others actually learn sth from it (that lesson should be trivial, but nowadays it obviously is all but common sense). And I guess: Not very much. They will 'give a fuck' here how bad the world and all is, and then continue in their naive way tomorrow.
Except, elsewhere in this thread:
> the prices they quoted were ridiculously high (thousands of dollars a month).
Though I'm not sure how legal that would've been if done in a paid app. It feels like a serious difference between just providing a better UX for someone else's service through adversarial interoperability for free, and profiting off of it.
Your other question about the cost is answered in the blog post and in several other comments I have left in this thread. In short, when I started the app 10 years ago there was no paid API (perhaps there was some kind of "enterprise" version but I'm not sure). The point of my post is how poorly they handled the transition from free->paid.
Sounds like Yelp sent a form letter.
Good platforms get more valuable with more apps: iOS, Windows, etc
Bad platforms don't get better with more apps: reddit, netflix, twitter. So they always end up killing the API.
Related to the earlier "old & grumpy" 3rd party API post, I've seen far too many, otherwise, outstanding businesses held hostage and summarily executed by either sudden un-explained usage-tier/throttling policies without economic recompense or the outright deactivation of API keys w/o notice or explanation.
https://business.yelp.com/products/yelp-ads/
Same as the Reddit stunt versus the Apollo app dev, except that his app had a big enough audience you'd think they'd have figured something out.
Nope. The paid app meant money from users to the app dev instead of from advertisers to the site.
What's strange is Reddit didn't seem to do the math on how little they should have charged the app dev for API access if all they wanted was to offset revenue from that user base. Perhaps the fear was much as with TV streaming: they know advertisers want audiences willing to pay, not only the audiences seeking free.
"People still use yelp? I thought it was widely known that they suppress bad reviews for money, and suppress good reviews if you don't pay."
Yelp's path to monetization has always been kind of scummy IMO.
A judge said that it wasn't extortion for yelp to hide good reviews until a company pays yelp, and that it wasn't extortion for yelp to remove bad reviews for companies that do pay them money though so I guess we're supposed to act like that's acceptable behavior and that their reviews can be considered trustworthy
- IC should have recognized the site was driving traffic to Yelp and flagged to management.
- Management should have realized that some API usage is beneficial to Yelp overall, and crafted a plan around this.
Just pure insanity. If I were a VP I'd fire everyone involved for a lack of basic critical thinking skills.
Does the linkedin scraping lawsuit permit scraping yelp?
Every business will eventually turn anything that they can into a profitable feature for them.
Every customer will eventually turn anything they can use for free, into a profitable feature for themselves.
There was a book called the 1 minute manager: it was followed by a book called the 59 second employee.
Never rely on an unscupulus third party, or if a third party becomes unscrupulous... Hunt them down.
I disliked Yelp, and held it in deep distain, then while working for a service company, Yelp called. "For a fee we can remove all negative reviews." This is the definition of ensh*tification. So... I told him I would get back to him. I called a few numbers at Yelp and was basically able to socially engineer a vast list of their revinue growth supervisors.
I made a list of every business in that city and the next, and related my experence, and how worthless a Yelp review was. Almost all the business responded to poor reviews with a 'i bet you are a Yelp employee drumming up money for fake reviews.' after a few weeks, I gathered up a lot of these, and sent a three page letter of them in a package with 50 of the Yelp peoples's names in it. I let that stew for a few days, and then called the idiot back. He said "we don't care." They don't. They do not care in the least. Google, OAth, and Facebook do not either. Hurt them in their advertising review and then they will listen.
Of course my stuff also breaks because you cant really do anything anymore without trusting anything even against better judgement.
I think we will eventually get expensive quality terms of service for those who think it might be fun if things work forever, like html documents and megalithic structures.
They miss the spirit of this blog post entirely, which is to point out the overt hostility to and powerlessness of API users. That should be concerning to anyone working on projects that use APIs, which is, um... almost everyone, these days.
Well, free APIs anyway. If you are paying for API access, you hopefully have a contract which gives you power.
Not everyone. Business that build on top of other company's APIs will arrange contracts with their API providers. Those contracts generally include warning periods for changes or discontinuation and penalties for early termination.
The key here is that it was a free API with no contract or guarantees. Four days is short notice and frustrating, but it wouldn't have really changed the trajectory of his business if they had given him 180 days. If he didn't intend to pay for the API, he couldn't really sell an app that was going to stop working in a few months.
So I know we're supposed to be angry about the 4 days thing. It's not good, obviously. However, I don't think it actually changes the situation at all if he wasn't going to sign up anyway.
As I said in the post and comments here if it made financial sense and they gave me a more reasonable deadline with a less threatening email I would be willing to pay for the API. In this case it didn't make financial sense, so you're right at the current API prices it wouldn't make sense even with 6 months-notice.
That said, 6-months (your suggested time period) is a much better grace period for our shared users (users of Restaurants who use it as a frontend and continue to read more reviews at Yelp.com) and much more likely to make me convert to a paid API customer if it had made financial sense.
I don't understand. Are you saying that even if it did make financial sense, you would have voluntarily shut the app down in protest of the 4-day notice period? Even though the sales rep pointed you toward the free trial option to continue using the API beyond the 4 days while you decided?
I know you're angry and want us all to be angry at Yelp too, but I have a difficult time believing that anyone would choose to destroy a profitable application out of protest just to stick it to the company about a short notice period.
An app that sold 467 copies over 10 years at less than $5 a copy is not worth the trouble of dealing with a company that gives you Friday->Monday ultimatums. Obviously, if it were a big source of my income I would have to seriously consider it. But luckily, it's not. I discussed this in the "Development Ends" section of the post. Here is the pricing deck they sent me: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
It seems to indicate a $229 base monthly price on the third slide for my use case.
> I know you're angry and want us all to be angry at Yelp too, but I have a difficult time believing that anyone would choose to destroy a profitable application out of protest just to stick it to the company.
I'm sorry you're reading so much anger in my post. I thought my blog post was pretty balanced. The worst I called them is "quite rude" (I think it's hard to read their emails otherwise) and spent the first half of it describing my app. I never expressed much emotion in my post, and frankly as mentioned above it really doesn't matter in the scheme of things for my life. What I do want is Yelp to change the way it treats developers. Perhaps if someone there reads this it will cause a tiny reflection on their part. I also hope the experience here expressed in the "Lessons Learned" section of the post is useful to other indie developers.
That's what's crazy to me about all these comments. What does it say that so many developers have glossed over this simple ask for more considerate and respectful treatment for THEMSELVES? What does it say that the knee jerk response is fatalism to whatever big tech does?
This is kind of the salient point.
Either you test on the free API and plan on paying for access slightly before its ready to go live, or you try the "free lunch" approach and see if you can get one by the tendy and see how long you can go before you get shut down and have to pony up the money.
Either way. they should've had the cost of the API in their budget.
We should all know by now. . . . nobody rides for free.
There was no cost to the API ten years ago. I submitted a prototype of my app to their developer program, described its functionality and exchanged a few emails back and forth with someone in developer relations. They specifically approved it and decided how many API calls to give me. A paid API didn't exist back then to my knowledge (perhaps there was some kind of enterprise API but I don't know?). The point of the post is how badly Yelp handled the transition from free to paid. They are perfectly in their right to transition to paid. But they should've handled the emails and transition better.
As mentioned in the post I developed the app on a whim. But after 10 years, it had a few users, although not many. They and I should have received more than a few days notice from Yelp that the API was going to become unsustainable (see my comments elsewhere in this thread).
Just as I have zero chance of getting Apple to sign that they won't remove my app if they feel like it.
This has been known for like 20 years now. We all know that if you're relying on someone else's API that's a massive risk to your business. What more is there to say at this point? What sympathy is there to give when the inevitable happens?
Or, they completely get it but they work for large platforms that leverage API access commercially or strategically, so their response to unruly peasants is to figuratively chop their heads off.
Even leaving out that it was with only a grotesquely unprofessional four day notice, this is ridiculous. It's not like Yelp was suffering a DDoS from all of those API calls.
Somewhat silly we’re still relying on big companies to collect this data when they then gate it. The timing is right with LLMs that can make maintaining and rating reviews less burdensome on human labor (“moderation” broadly speaking). It’s just text blobs and possibly images linked to people and places.
The traditional restaurant reviewer filled this role much better. His role as a trusted arbiter was closer to what people want from a site like Yelp, but it’s very labor intensive and obviously doesn’t scale.
Only ways I could see it working at scale are Wikipedia model, which is labor intensive for a large number of people, or some kind of web of trust / reputation system, which is complicated and attackable.
High quality people want to be helpful, they just need a platform where curation and distribution takes place. See: here. I’m just tired of seeing startups and other companies build and kill these knowledge and community based third spaces, and the intangible value inherent to them.
(customer identity is a component of my work in fintech as an infosec lead, I get paid to squash bots and fraud)
But it would quickly become a victim of its own success as people start using it and the database gets big enough to be useful. bots and spammers would swarm the platform to try to game it. That would require a constant cat and mouse game that would not be fun. Without significant ongoing attention, the site is going to become worthless. In order for a site like this that is labor intensive and not fun to exist, it would need to be monetized at least to the extent it can pay salaries. That's the point at which I don't see any realistic solution. In order to maintain neutrality, it would need to be supported by users, meaning users would need to pay. I don't see very many people paying for something like this. And even if some would, there would have to be some benefit or reason for paid users to pay, and that seems like it would open the door for more cat and mouse games and abuse.
Just a hard problem I think.
like, imagine a vegan, a devout hindu, a muslim, a carnivore, a neighborhood kid, and a foodie editing an article about a texas steakhouse that is known for its barbecued pork. whatever text any of these people finds unfairly biased is going to get deleted from the article, and what's left is what they can agree on
this process produces astoundingly reliable articles on contentious topics like the armenian genocide, but the results are predictably of poor literary quality, and generally not very useful for things like guessing which restaurant you would prefer to eat at
Google seems to have done a good job with review spam on Google Maps, better than their job with SEO spam and malicious search results, and deep+diverse datasets are effectively Alphabet's (not just Google's) entire business.
Yelp would have a very hard time getting to know as much about review submitters, an open data platform would have a hard time gathering even what Yelp already collects.
The results clearly indicate it is.
Remember the world is far more vast than just Hacker News.
Zagat worked pretty well for "foodies" back in a day when raters had to physically mail in hardcopy questionnaires and people had to buy guidebooks in stores. I'm not sure how you duplicate that today absent physical pay-walls on both sides which I can't really see working.
I do think the various rating sites--Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google--"work" in the sense that they're probably better than picking at random. And you can't really call the local newspaper's food critic on the phone (which is what my dad used to do). So I'm not sure what the alternative really is. Yes, there's some word of mouth but that's pretty random.
https://www.dailydot.com/via/yelp-extortion-lawsuit/
https://cutthroatmarketing.com/heres-why-you-shouldnt-advert...
https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/h9ohs6/has_a...
(Anecdotally, I also seem to be seeing this on Google Maps now! It seems like highly rated but local restaurants don't even show up on the map at all until I zoom in literally to the building -- perhaps because the owners don't pay for ads? Crazy if true... and Bing maps seem to not have all the restaurants or ratings, and you can't seem to filter based on rating either, which seems like a massive Bing fail. Maybe the review apps were always destined to crumble under a business model that encourages dishonesty on both sides..)
Anyway, tl;dr: I think they're working on replacing Yelp.
/s
I mean, don't take this as me defending Yelp - they're scumbags, and deserve any hate coming their way - but I don't think that the headline is an accurate description of what happened.
After 2 seconds of idle research, I have found that it would cost less than a dollar a day.
On top of that, this is a continuous payment. Even if I was looking at 5-10x rate of return, I would be very hesitant as that's the rate-of-return today while the sales are forever.
I've been wondering how realistic microsubscriptions are... Say $1-2 dollars a month per user to maintain an app, perhaps limited to just power users, would support a lot of infrastructure.
In addition though, they shared the following pricing deck with me: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
Which seems to indicate a base price of $229 per month. I have no idea why that doesn't line up with the pricing on their website. But the fact that they shared it with me indicated to me that my use case fell under some kind of "enterprise" usage. Regardless, I would not continue to work with them after 4-days notice and the threatening email. It's too small and app for it to be worth it to me.
I did ask in one of my emails about the pricing discrepancy and got no reply.