Yahoo BOSS API is no longer free | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo BOSS API is no longer free

techcrunch.com

37 pointsvaksel13 comments

This headline is typically misleading.

The first 10k requests a day are free. Previously it was 5k.

Once you pass that threshold (it's not that low) it starts being charged according to your use.

I'd love to hear feedback on what people think about this pricing model. Please feel free to leave a comment here or email me croucher at yarrhoo dot com (remove the pirate misspelling).

Edit: Whoops forgot the disclaimer. I work for Y!

> The first 10k requests a day are free. Previously it was 5k.

The 5K limit you refer to is from the old Yahoo Search API, Yahoo Boss allowed "unlimited queries".

My bad. :)

I should say it's 30 "units"/day not 10k requests. Depending on the number of results you get back.

For all on-peak requests that would be a maximum of 10k search requests.

Off-peak it would be 30k search requests.

If you needed more results per request then the amount of free requests would be less. Spelling requests would also be counted as the same rate as off-peak. You can mix and match as much as you want.

So what does this mean for duckduckgo.com ? They're based on the BOSS api and I figure that by now they're passed the 10.000 requests a day.

this was my first thought, too.

I think this is fantastic. I would way rather get charged a reasonable amount for a useful service than have to wonder if it will be around in the future or how they're making money off me.

The title editorialises needlessly, and incorrectly. The API remains free for up to 10,000 queries a day. That is more than all the traffic the techcrunch network makes, so it remains free for most everyone.

If I understand well, Techcrunch uses BOSS API only for custom search of their sites. I would expect only a small fraction of their visitors search directly from Techcrunch sites.

The change would affect significantly somebody who uses API as a part of their primary function of the site [1], for example for some search mashup (like various Cuil parodies or DuckDuckGo). For these, basically each page view could be one (or more) API requests.

[1] http://mashable.com/boss

Yahoo! should have announced this as the plan from the start. Its awful hard to give something away for free, then go back to charging for it. At the very least, they should have grandfathered everyone in who was already using BOSS.

I understand the desire to charge for a service like this, but the way Yahoo! handled this does not encourage me to use their services (I've used BOSS extensively).

Yahoo! did say that there was a pricing model coming in the future for BOSS from the start. I'm sorry you feel frustrated. I'd be interested to hear if you have any ideas about how we could have communicated that better. It sucks that you we flip-flopped.

Disclaimer: I work for Y!

I was wondering if anyone could break down the pricing plan for me. Talk about needlessly complicated... Also, if any current BOSS users can comment on how this will affect their operations, that would be awesome.

The exact breakdown is here.

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/fees.html

There are two examples:

* Developer A submits 7000 API requests in a given day. Each API call requests search results 1-10. Since 1000 requests of this type cost 3 units (for a total of 21 units) and each developer gets 30 units per day for free, Developer A is not charged anything.

* Developer B also submits 7000 API requests. Each API call requests results 1-100. Since 1000 requests of this type cost 10 units (for a total of 70 units) and each developer gets 30 units per day for free, Developer B will be charged for 40 units (70 - 30 = 40). The price of 40 units is $4.00 (40 x $0.10 = $4.00).

It's also worth noting that pricing is in units of 1000 requests however we will charge per request, it's just not worth quoting prices for units smaller than 1000.

Disclaimer: I work for Y!

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