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Comment by patrickod | Hacker News Reader

It's not unreasonable to think that companies would warn you before cutting off your API key. Any time I've ever integrated with a 3rd party API and come close to reaching their limit I've gotten friendly emails from devs asking if they can be of assistance.

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That's kind of hit or miss.

I wouldn't be surprised if a small or new company emailed me about nearing the API limit. They're trying to build a relationship.

But a Fortune 500 like Yahoo or Google? They couldn't care less about someone trying to use their free API. You're just one of thousands to them.

It's easily automated. It's still a nice thing to do for your users. Also just because you're a fortune 500 doesn't mean you shouldn't take steps to build relationships with your users. The same attitude works in reverse. You have freedom of choice with the service you use.

I think the email is the first part of building the relationship. Sure the first email is automated, but you can't call it building a relationship unless there's a real human being on that end trying to understand what's going wrong.

Agreed. Trying to pass automated emails as personal never works. It is, however, a step in the right direction. Knowing that a dev is looking after the API users is somewhat comforting.

> Any time I've ever integrated with a 3rd party API and come close to reaching their limit I've gotten friendly emails from devs asking if they can be of assistance.

They didn't "come close", they blew through it in what sounds like minutes.

250,000 photos downloaded in 2 hours, according to http://www.flickraft.com/. 100x the API limit!

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