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You get a cease and desist letter, you cease and desist doing the stuff if you don't want / can't afford a legal fight.

Then you post the cease and desist letter on your website, and post about it on hacker news.

And everyone using the API will break.

Very risky business.

The first time I had the plug pulled on a public API a product I worked on used sucked pretty bad. At this point its happened to me so many times that its just another line item of business risks thats an inevitability. I've never worked at a company that failed to recover as a result. Then again, I've never worked at a company whose entire business hinged on one single API.

The likelihood of things breaking or behaving in unexpected ways are data points I think about when assessing risk irrespective of whether an API is public or not. In some industries even the public APIs are more risky than using the unofficial Venmo API likely is.

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