It's probably just good old-fashioned greed. Worked for X and Reddit, why wouldn't it work for them?

Uhm, having a weather api is probably the easiest thing to implement because of how catchable it is. Any public api accidental can be prevented by tiered rate-limiting:

- uber low limits for anon access

- low, but reasonable for register free users

- Up-to-you for paid users

You might say: well, proxies are cheaper than paid plan, and solution to that - charge reasonable price.

you should see what happened when people finally understood XMLHttpRequest!