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.
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).
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