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Comment by guywithahat | Hacker News Reader

I would be upset too, but this sort of sounds like someone did him a favor 10 years ago, management changed, and now management wants him to pay. This sucks, but near infinite free api calls sounds unsustainable

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Well the thing is they gave me 25000 per day, but the actual use was less than 100. The 25000 number is almost a red herring to the rest of the story.

It’s understandable they went to paid. What’s not understandable is the 4 days notice and tone of the email.

A 25,000 calls per day limit for an API sounds absurdly low. Any idea if the API calls actually would have used much in the way of backend resources, or do you reckon it was more just mostly a database lookup?

I would be surprised if it were much more than a database lookup.

Yeah, it's probably that simple. 25k calls may only be a few seconds worth of actual database runtime too, if that.

API rate-limits have always been a cash grab and a way to discourage efficient automated use in favor of getting a human to "engage" instead.

We received the exact same letter from Yelp. Our usage is significantly higher and when we talked to them, the prices they quoted were ridiculously high (thousands of dollars a month).

Sorry to hear that. What was your product?

We have a analytics SaaS which displays, among many other pieces of data, ratings from different providers, including Yelp.

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

> a analytics SaaS which displays, among many other pieces of data,

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

If the price is too high for you, here is my idea for you: don't use their product. ;)

Exactly, we're not. We're closing our products. They are perfectly welcome to charge too high a price for us. They just should've communicated it better.

Honestly, making people pay for an app that only uses a public API you’re not paying for, and no form of fallback is asking for trouble. This is not a responsible way to do business and I hope people reading this thread will understand that.

Since ~15 years, people got the idea that all the WhatsApps, Instagrams or Twitters around them aren't companies, but kind of public infrastructure. They all knew that it's a wrong assumption, but it's sooo convenient, and at some point, people around you force you in that direction, even if you don't like all those walled gardens. And once this wrong philosophy was established, people started escalating it to some smaller shops, I guess. Those are also the guys that complain when some 3rd party Reddit or Youtube hobby clients must disappear. They just have no understanding at all about some basic mechanics of human interaction. The biggest problem: There are entire generations of people nowadays with that misunderstanding.

> near infinite free api calls

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.)

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