Hacker News Reader

Comment by alluro2 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the reply - I did not mean to rant, but, unfortunately, this is in context of a B2B service, and the other side are most commonly IT teams of customers.

There are, of course, both very capable and professional people, and also kind people who are keen to react / learn, but we've also had situations where 429s result in complaints to their management how our API "doesn't work", "is unreliable" and then demanding refunds / threatening legal action etc...

One example was sending 1.3M update requests a day to manage state of ~60 entities, that have a total of 3 possible relevant state transitions - a humble expectation would be several requests/day to update batches of entities.

View on HN

> I did not mean to rant

Not at all, I sympathise, we're all like minded people here!

> One example was sending 1.3M update requests a day to manage state of ~60 entities, that have a total of 3 possible relevant state transitions

> but we've also had situations where 429s result in complaints to their management how our API "doesn't work", "is unreliable" and then demanding refunds / threatening legal action etc

That's painful, and at this point, we're beyond technical solutions, this need human solutions. If they can't realise that they're rate limited because they're basically abusing the API, they need to be told in no uncertain terms.

Of course I understand that it's not that simple, as a backend dev, my "customers" are usually other devs so I can be frank, but when dealing with B2B customers we often have to act like they're not in the wrong.

But that is a question that should be escalated to management right? If they charge the customer enough that allowing them to make 1.3M requests to update 60 entities makes sense, why not let them?

If they want the service stupidly overprovisioned to deal with these nutjobs, then that’s what we’ll do. I find that they’re generally receptive to the message of $10k per month to serve nutjobs, $100 per month to serve everyone else, though.

That’s the key - have that in place from the beginning.

Because many “enterprise” customers can spend literally millions doing shit the absolute wrong way, but have $0 budget for a developer to make it work right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com