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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

Google isn't omniscient. You probably won't get noticed by them until you are large enough to pay their fee. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Google never enforces this $10K rule, and that it's there just in case.

And if you do get noticed, and they decide to enforce the rule, nothing is stopping you from making that one feature free.

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They're not omniscient, but I wouldn't count on that. It wouldn't be all that hard to collect a unique list of URL's and have an intern go through a bunch of them per day. The list could probably be augmented pretty easily with some analysis of the page content to detect fee related text, and they certainly have the technology to make that happen. They can narrow it down pretty quickly too based on what key your using to access the API.

The terms are pretty clear. Better to pay it if your using it and charging for it up front rather than try to get clever and get caught later and potentially have legal fees to pay on top of it IMHO.

if Google did this before, I'm sure people would have heard about it by now. Right now it seems like they are choosing to ignore this.

Noone really reads terms of service, so I'm pretty sure the $10K fee wouldn't stick. What would probably happen when you'd get caught, is you'd get an email from Google telling you that you've broken their ToS and that if you want to continue using their service you'd need to either a) start paying $10K/mo or b) make the service public

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