We received the exact same letter from Yelp. Our usage is significantly higher and when we talked to them, the prices they quoted were ridiculously high (thousands of dollars a month).
Exactly, we're not. We're closing our products. They are perfectly welcome to charge too high a price for us. They just should've communicated it better.
We have a analytics SaaS which displays, among many other pieces of data, ratings from different providers, including Yelp.
I assumed that Yelp had been doing this all along and we ran above some predetermined limit, but the email we received was identical to yours. So I'm thinking that Yelp is trying its best to monetize all API users
> a analytics SaaS which displays, among many other pieces of data,
Does yelp (or others) allow the restaurant to modify the menu/offer coupons in a dynamic way? (i.e. change multiple times per hour, update with in minutes)
A 25,000 calls per day limit for an API sounds absurdly low. Any idea if the API calls actually would have used much in the way of backend resources, or do you reckon it was more just mostly a database lookup?
Honestly, making people pay for an app that only uses a public API you’re not paying for, and no form of fallback is asking for trouble. This is not a responsible way to do business and I hope people reading this thread will understand that.
Since ~15 years, people got the idea that all the WhatsApps, Instagrams or Twitters around them aren't companies, but kind of public infrastructure. They all knew that it's a wrong assumption, but it's sooo convenient, and at some point, people around you force you in that direction, even if you don't like all those walled gardens. And once this wrong philosophy was established, people started escalating it to some smaller shops, I guess. Those are also the guys that complain when some 3rd party Reddit or Youtube hobby clients must disappear. They just have no understanding at all about some basic mechanics of human interaction. The biggest problem: There are entire generations of people nowadays with that misunderstanding.
It’s understandable they went to paid. What’s not understandable is the 4 days notice and tone of the email.