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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Probably what happened was 1 support rep helped you out but did it through some undocumented backdoor to unblock you and not a formal contract. Later a completely unrelated set of employees are tasked with figuring out who the biggest API users are and to either cut them loose or get them to start paying.

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Yes, this was surely somewhat tied to employee turnover and poor record keeping. But I was almost certainly not one of the "biggest API users."

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.

Indeed, 4 days does seem too aggressive. You are probably a victim of automation:

    for (apiKey in apiKeys)
        if (userShouldPay(apiKey))
            sendCanned4DayWarningEmail(apiKey);

There's yellow squiggly underneath userShouldPay(apiKey) that reads:

userShouldPay(apiKey) always evaluates to True.

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