I would be upset too, but this sort of sounds like someone did him a favor 10 years ago, management changed, and now management wants him to pay. This sucks, but near infinite free api calls sounds unsustainable
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?
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).
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)
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.
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.
but the author pointed out that it drove traffic to Yelp, and that almost certainly seems to be true.
In fact, little integration plays like this app might have been the only thing keeping Yelp sort-of alive after Google got into the game.
Killing off your bizdev partners seems incredibly short-sighted and foolish. (Also, feeding the reviews into an AI... for what, exactly? To train a model on how to write reviews? Or perhaps to detect fake reviews -- actually, that was an issue on Yelp even before AI, so it seems like it wouldn't be the best training content.)
I think this is the giant internet trick... do anything to scale, then when you reach critical mass (or someone wants OKRs on their status report), pull out the rug.
To be fair there wasn’t much scale. We’re talking about an app that sold 467 copies over its 10 year span. But it was an app I really liked, the people who paid for it really liked, and just drove traffic to Yelp, so they should’ve liked too. It was also a nice portfolio piece for me.
Yeah, given the numbers it doesn't make sense for Yelp to kill it. It's not like a few hundred api calls are costing yelp any significant amount of money.
Wow. less than 47 copies per year on average.. Yelp really cut off their nose to spite their face there.
Even leaving out that it was with only a grotesquely unprofessional four day notice, this is ridiculous. It's not like Yelp was suffering a DDoS from all of those API calls.
I think Yelp is shutting off their API for the same reason as Reddit: to ensure that AI training makes money for them. It sucks that you’re a drive-by casualty of that, and if I’d bought this app, then - same as Apollo iOS - I would not request a refund.
> To wit, there is exactly one business strategy: When you are small, be nice. When you are big, pull that ladder up behind you.
I'd add a "in venture capital and big capital" after "business strategy". When you don't have VCs or the stonk market breathing down your neck all the time, incentives massively change.
IMHO, there is only one solution left... once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust that has a clear mandate to run its companies in a way beneficial to society at large. That way the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on countless r&d experiments, VC investors have a perspective to payout, and the world gets kept from utter bullshit like API games.
Why? The problem at the core is the mantra of the WSB et al groupthink: stonk only go up.
Of course when WSB makes jokes about it and catapults a junk stock like GME to ridiculous heights, squeezing shortsellers dry, it's pretty funny to watch. But it gets problematic when just about everyone's pension is tied to "stonks go up" as well. That leads to all sorts of perverse incentives.
Just look at Boeing and how far they've fallen. Twice in recent years, literally and not just proverbially, with hundreds dead as the inevitable consequence of stonk market games.
I think the GP had a visceral reaction to your intentional misspelling of "stock" as "stonk".
I tend to agree, though I don't think I'd go so far as to think someone saying "stonk" has "lost all credibility"... but to me, it's like Republicans deliberately mispronouncing Kamala Harris' first name, because they can, and because their base eats it up. It's a cheap shot, and it feels childish, like you don't have a real argument, so instead you act like an elementary school kid on the playground calling the other kid names.
> It's a cheap shot, and it feels childish, like you don't have a real argument, so instead you act like an elementary school kid on the playground calling the other kid names.
> the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on countless r&d experiments
If you expect the government to make a tender offer on the largest market-cap companies, they sure as heck _are_ paying for r&d indirectly. And a lot more!
I think it's quite different. It involves money, but QE is all about monetary supply and interest rates alone. Buying entire companies comes with a lot more implications, like decision-making power over the organization. You want that for API keys, but do you want that across the board? Seems like regulation would be much cheaper.
Thanks for replying, today I corrected a misunderstanding i had about QE. I had previously believed they were buying and selling stocks (I misunderstood their usage of "Securities")
Well if small capital doesn't pay good, I have no incentive to run a small business at all!
> once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust
Interesting, haven't heard that one. I'll say maybe. I'd rather have Facebook not exist at all than have it be an *official* arm of the NSA
YouTube already uses Widevine for movies. they will never use it for regular videos, because it will kill their website. widevine is a resource killer, for both client and server.
Yes. We're entering a new era of web applications, whether we want to or not. Companies used to be able to gate their data behind UIs, because the search results had more value than the raw data.
Things are starting to flip. Increasingly, people would rather have access to the raw dataset to pipe into an LLM. The question, as always, is how to control this access and charge people accordingly.
This has been one [unintended?] consequence of AI promulgation. A direct disincentive toward the kind of open access that so used to be common and provided a lot of low-hanging fruit for independent developers trying to increase interoperability within their favorite niches.
So now not only is AI filling the web with garbage that poisons future model development[1], it provides incentive to further close and wall off access to (user-provided!) data.
I think you're right. API strategies are being reviewed because AI training data.
That said... I think API policies are also vestiges of a defunct idea set that prevailed circa 2009.
At that time, "twitter is a protocol." APIs and openness were going to be the new worldwideweb. Social media was going to be an ecosystem of independent apps and services with complex interactions mitigated by protocols.
YC even did an "rfs" recruiting startups to build off the twitter API.
That didn't happen, but APIs intended to enable it were already in the wild.
As API access becomes strategic again (because AI), "why do we even have this?" is likely to come up.
Yep I specifically keep Google Maps around to find restaurants even though I far prefer the audible navigation from Apple Maps nowadays once I actually want to drive there.
i do the same. Plus Apple Maps handles audio and lock screen much better. Apple must be calling a private API to manage lock screen during driving. When I drive with Google Maps, the screen locks and blocks navigation
Especially since there were apparently complaints that Yelp was doing pay-to-play with good reviews for a while, which diminishes the truthiness value of any reviews:
(Anecdotally, I also seem to be seeing this on Google Maps now! It seems like highly rated but local restaurants don't even show up on the map at all until I zoom in literally to the building -- perhaps because the owners don't pay for ads? Crazy if true... and Bing maps seem to not have all the restaurants or ratings, and you can't seem to filter based on rating either, which seems like a massive Bing fail. Maybe the review apps were always destined to crumble under a business model that encourages dishonesty on both sides..)
I've noticed that Apple Maps incorporated their own rating system some time ago (I want to say within the last one or two years); it's simple, just asking you to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on certain businesses, sometimes with a bit of granularity (e.g., rate the atmosphere, food, value, and service separately). There appears to be some threshold for how many ratings they have when they switch from displaying Yelp reviews to their own stuff, although it's not clear what the heuristic is.
Anyway, tl;dr: I think they're working on replacing Yelp.
Typically for copyright infringement. They'll sue you for the maximum legal damages possible per copy, multiplied by the number of times your bot loaded a page, probably in the trillions of dollars.
I'm happy to write code to let users circumvent the restrictions put in place by assholes, as long as it doesn't end up getting them in legal trouble I'm fine with it. If companies like google don't want people to try and screw them over, I suggest they offer an olive branch and stop being unethical jerks.
It is in Illinois. Their Computer Tampering law specifically makes violation of a web sites ToS punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Probably other states have similar.
Coprporations (or other organiztions or individuals) can make things available to the public without completely ceding control over how they are used.
Imagine a landowner who allows public access to hikers using defined trails but no overnight camping. That's legal and just has to be posted. If you don't like it, don't use it.
SerpAPI is a convenient wrapper API for scraping various sites. I assume they've vetted all the legality of things. They have a YouTube API: https://serpapi.com/yelp-search-api
Still they have a boilerplate ToS with some glaring mistakes:
> These Terms of Service and any separate agreements whereby we provide you Services shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of 5540 N Lamar Blvd #12, Austin, TX, 78756, United States. (sic)
In that case, the court found 3Taps was criminally guilty for scraping publicly available craigslist data while logged out because 3Taps knew their use was not authorized.
This person has just received an email from Yelp telling them their free usage is not authorized, so circumventing that may well be illegal, now that they've been given that sort of communication, even if it might be questionably legal for other serpapi users.
The courts are altering their views on scrapping. This [0] is a good paper that explored the last 20 years of rulings (although it hasn't been updated with the most recent cases).
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, because it's a reasonable question - the answer being that such scraping requires a lot more time and technical expertise to engineer than a simple API call. Also devolves into a cat and mouse game between your application's backend and whatever proxy they put in front of yelp like cloudflare, which you'll probably lose or will be prohibitively expensive.
That would probably as big or bigger project than the entire rest of the app itself, and since it is such a single developer and not a super profitable app it likely makes no sense to do this.
Not surprising at all. Yelp, Paypal and their ilk deserve all of their earned derision for, amazingly, being simultaneously user, customer, and developer hostile.
Related to the earlier "old & grumpy" 3rd party API post, I've seen far too many, otherwise, outstanding businesses held hostage and summarily executed by either sudden un-explained usage-tier/throttling policies without economic recompense or the outright deactivation of API keys w/o notice or explanation.
I'm sorry to read that. Unfortunately, it isn't an uncommon story.
> if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you are at their whim.
That's the money quote, there. I avoid using third-party APIs like the plague. I have written backend aggregators and facias, to avoid having to use the API.
I Just. Will. Not. embed an opaque codeball into my app. I'm a cranky old bastard, I know, but I sleep well at night.
Amen. Doing the wrong thing is easy. Doing the right thing is hard. These are thermodynamically-mandated rules that cannot ever be circumvented by cleverness or money or hard work.
Open-source libraries aren’t opaque. Third-party web APIs are. The latter should only be used if they are non-critical, easily replaceable, or contractually bound to sufficient assurances.
I built a service around helping podcasters automatically convert their audio podcast into a YouTube channel. I went through tons of review with Google in order to get access to the YouTube API and make sure everything I was doing was in compliance with their terms - literally months of back and forth. I had been testing in my development and staging environments against their API for 6+ months. I launched in production, got a few videos uploaded to YouTube, and they disabled my API key. I spent months emailing them and never got anything more than the same boilerplate copy/pasted answer. I could have pivoted or something, but I just shut it down and moved on. Lesson learned.
Sure, its $10m today, but think of all the other potential startups that they're doing this to, and how many millions they're throwing away, and billions over the long haul. Reddit, Twitter, and company all got big because they had open APIs and people were able to use them extensively for really creative things.
I agree, Google has swallowed up the video streaming market unfortunately.
I keep thinking back to how Vine was basically TikTok, and they threw it away.
>Sure, its $10m today, but think of all the other potential startups that they're doing this to, and how many millions they're throwing away, and billions over the long haul.
Google made $300B last year. "billions over the long haul" is a lot of money, an unimaginable amount even, to you and I. But to Google?
I mean, they "make" both. "Make" does not imply profit. If you say a company "made" a revenue figure, then you mean it in the revenue sense. It's contextual.
100% contextual. In every business where I've been an executive, or had access to the budget, we talk "made" as gross revenue and EBIDA as a stand in gross profit and specifically call out net profit in internal meetings. For example, "We made 10 million with an EBIDA of 1 million and net of 200,000.00." Using EBIDA to talk to potential investors and as a guiding metric if we didn't have a well established gross profit formula that followed GAAP.
I don't think that's nearly as universal an assumption as you're claiming. Like--I made $X,000 dollars last year, but I also have a mortgage and like to eat food.
The assumtion things were great wasn’t mine. I live in a HCL area and am not able to save much so in this sense the ‘profit’ of my work is close to zero. That is not great at all…
First off - how much of revenue usage last year was on fines etc. That is to say profit they could potentially have had.
Second there is lots of revenue you use for "business" because you don't want to pay taxes on the profit and anyway it is giving you something you like to have.
How much of Google's revenue is used to do things for top executives and people with power in the company that is really something they (the executives) should be taxed on but is instead a business expense of google (cars, transport, 'working' vacations, security, super cool chefs preparing meals at the company...) Hard to say really because if you knew the answer it would actually be something they were taxed on. But it's not 0 - sure probably not a billion, but a couple hundred million splashed around wouldn't surprise me.
How much of Google's revenue usage is for wages and other forms of payout to executives etc. (stock) that does not get counted as profit but of course it is amounts those people want to have.
Google made $73.795B profit last year, and expensed slightly over 262B - some portion of which the people who run Google no doubt personally thought of the way we would consider profit in our day to day existence, and another portion of which were fines for things they did in getting the rest of the money.
Obviously the fines, which are the first thing mentioned, is relevant for how much the shareholders got.
Literally the other stuff is relevant for how remunerative the people who actually run the companies, day-to-day, feel those companies are (put in day-to-day because I got the feeling you might give me a lecture about the shareholders actually running the company)
Personally I think you have a decent point since in practice employees of GOOG are shareholders too. Although I don’t know if their interests matter to the corporate entity because I don’t know what percentage is held by insiders.
Those startups are their competitors. You don’t have to pay millions of dollars to acquire a competitor that was never started because of your inconsistent API policy.
Google makes enough money that losing several currently non-existent revenue streams that are theoretically $10 million apiece isn’t hurting them. It’s hurting their users.
Google is all about ads - why would they give a shit about the users?
It's a testimate to the health of our free market that the company throwing away millions, and billions over the long haul, is the overwhelmingly dominant market leader.
Take it from someone who watched with interest, Reddit and Twitter did not get big due to open APIs. They got their first big steps before they even had APIs... In the first year of twitters launch it was in the news in the UK at 300k users in press releases about how it was a "new form of communication" etc... 2008 was actually when the original set of API-laden websites began to fade because with the recession, we could not have nice things be free so much. Many API services fell into disrepair in 2009, certainly the peak of APIs for the UK was around 2008. Check out Tom Scotts video on this for a picture of the open API internet many people thought would occur (and which did exist in some places until FAANG began to productise and dominate and use accounts across products which do not incentivize APIs). Yes it is true open network graphs/facebook etc had some API access, but the APIs before were more single purpose and numerous; facebook lets you explore their network and to some extent data, but that's not the same as the useful APIs that became restricted, paid or were cut in the aftermath of the recession.
Competitive markets are by far more the exception than the rule. It's just not how capitalism works (because pretty much any competitive market is ripe for “consolidation”, which increases aggregate shareholders value by reducing competitive pressure).
If you want competitive market in a capitalist economy, then you need very active state enforcement.
>Competitive markets are by far more the exception than the rule it's just not how capitalism works
Empirically this absolutely isn't the case; the majority of listed companies have fairly low margins, especially non-tech companies, which can be trivially seen from their financial statements. A low profit margin means a competitive market (because if it wasn't a competitive market the firm could raise its prices to obtain higher margins).
> A low profit margin means a competitive market (because if it wasn't a competitive market the firm could raise its prices to obtain higher margins).
Not necessarily: if prices are elastic then even a monopoly can aim for low profit margin (in percentage) in order to increase profit. What matters is how much total profit are being made, margin only matters when measuring risk.
Also, corporations are social structures, and low competition also encourage complacency in the corporate structure itself, which drives costs up and reduces profit margin.
The markets are absolutely competitive. Google has to pour money into youtube to keep it actively developed and popular. Yet they still lose live streamers to Twitch, video uploads to all kinds of niche specific platforms, and their paid content isn’t coming close to things like Netflix, max, prime, etc.
They are now hemorrhaging search to OpenAI that popped into public existence just recently.
To claim there isn’t competition in these markets is completely ignorant. “A big player eats 80%” isn’t anything like a monopoly/duopoly scenario where there literally isn’t any competition or product advancement for decades.
If you wanna see lack of competition, look at government granted monopolies on utilities. Guaranteed but capped rates means you reduce investment right to $0 and cut costs as much as possible since there is no other way to make money. That “state enforcement” you are calling for is how you end up with PG&E and scenarios like all insurances companies pulling out of the state.
> To claim there isn’t competition in these markets is completely ignorant. “A big player eats 80%” isn’t anything like a monopoly/duopoly scenario where there literally isn’t any competition or product advancement for decades.
Please tell me how many “product advancement” in Google search or YouTube over the past decade… From a consumer's perspective all that happened was enshitification and despite being owned by a search engine company, YouTube never managed to ship a functional search on their platform.
> If you wanna see lack of competition, look at government granted monopolies on utilities.
Utilities are “natural monopolies” though, and as such they should be state owned. Making a natural monopoly owned for profit is a recipe for rent seeking, and that's why it was promoted …
> That “state enforcement” you are calling for
No, the state enforcement I'm calling for is proper enforcement of antitrust laws, forbidding consolidation through M&A and disbanding companies megacorps. That is to say, what existed in US's golden age.
> Google has to pour money into youtube to keep it actively developed and popular. Yet they still lose live streamers to Twitch, video uploads to all kinds of niche specific platforms, and their paid content isn’t coming close to things like Netflix, max, prime, etc.
Phew, here I was stressing out about lack of competition, but you helped me relax.
Google has to invest into Youtube lest it loses out to Twitch (Amazon), Netflix ($35bn per year), HBO Max (Warner Bros, $50bn per year), (Amazon) Prime, Plus (Disney, $90bn per year).
My faith in humanity is restored now that there are alternatives.
That's not competition, that's an oligopoly and they are mostly focus on their own niche for which there isn't more than a minority competitor (there's no competitor to Youtube on for non-live video, Twitch is in a monopolistic competition situation for game streaming, so is netflix on TV series, and Disney and HBO each have a monopoly on their IP).
Claiming that this is a competitive market is a joke.
I was thinking about how to solve this given that one of the primary problems is that of fast, global content distribution. I like the idea of paying people in crypto as part of a ledger transaction to host and serve content, like bittorrent with a crypto payment. Unfortunately I can't also think of a way to prevent such a system from being abused to distribute harmful media such as CP. I guess it's not like this isn't a problem with BitTorrent today though.
Regulation might here - something like minimum mandatory 3 months notice for shutting down the API keys. Considering the average age of our politicians, I doubt they’ll understand what “API” is, much less be willing to take on giant tech corporations even if they did understand the problems
Yeah, what’s popular is actually to crap all over the first amendment by mandating private companies to allow whatever each politician’s special definition of “free speech” is (but of course probably also not allowing whatever the politician’s definition of “dangerous misinformation” is).
As for the actual anticompetitive power of big tech, absolute crickets.
Attempted to build a similar thing a few years ago when living in Tokyo.
Provide a selection of restaurants within a 1km radius and automagically provide 3 recommendations based on my preferences.
We had multiple API providers available, Tabelog, Gurunavi and Hotpepper, all required a paid developer license. We still needed to use the Google maps API to get the user's current location though.
This was also just when Google Maps suddenly raised their API pricing. After spending a couple of weekends building a working prototype, we stopped as we couldn't justify the cost of paying multiple API providers for basically 3 guys looking to save 10 mins deciding where to get lunch.
Also, this kind of app is a common theme if you frequent meetups in Tokyo. There's always at least 1 person that has built such a thing.
> We still needed to use the Google maps API to get the user's current location though.
I’m sure as somebody who actually built a prototype, you understand the situation better than me, but I’m curious: why would just getting the user’s lat/long require anything you’d pay for? Wouldn’t the OS or browser provide that to you?
Oops. I meant that we were using the maps/places API to get lat/long of the restaurants using the street address from the other API providers, then using that to calculate a 'N mins walk away'.
We were just testing the abilities of the various APIs. Google was the only that provided travelling time estimates.
We went through a three-week Facebook API shutdown due to a clear glitch - Meta support couldn't go outside the script, or escalate in any way beyond "a supervisor will email you". Only resolved when our CEO found some VP at Facebook on LinkedIn and got them to escalate it internally.
(The dev community thread is full of people still impacted, so I think they literally just edited our app's flags directly.)
Even tried to invoke GDPR's rights to be exempt from automatic decision making, but their privacy questions email address responds with "nope fuck off" to those.
Basically any hope of solving a problem with a Meta property is to know employees who can escalate your issue. Sometimes your friend at Meta also needs to argue with the bug owner to not close it frivolously.
Within the customer service industry, they'd claim a great "deflection rate". That's a metric that all of these large companies hold around any kind of help/support channel that may involve humans because people are a cost. It's often covered by some kind of satisfaction metric based off post-issue surveys, but fundamentally, if you just go away that's success.
There are often complaints here about what amounts to bean counting affecting other aspects of business. Customer service at larger scale is costly so attracts a section of very analytical leaders. They don't get, or ever prioritize, the human elements. It's only when satisfaction numbers are bad, or another exec outside of customer service takes action, that things improve.
The scale part kills the customer. You can have great support at one size. Once you grow then leadership, structure, and the culture change. These analytical leaders don't want to carry over the culture and structure because it comes at a cost. It really needs force and support from outside of customer support leadership to maintain it.
Had this issue with Ubisoft recently. Installed Trackmania through Steam for free, then had to create a Ubisoft account, then had to buy the Trackmania annual pass for $20. I guess I followed the wrong flow or something, but I ended up with the purchase on my Ubisoft account, but I guess their system also auto-creates a Ubisoft account for Steam accounts? So the purchase on the Ubisoft account ended up on the account not tied to Steam.
Emailed support about it on 13/07/2024.
Got back a reply on 23/07/2024:
> Our Support Team is currently experiencing high case volumes, so we are reaching out with a message to check-in and make sure you still need help!
> If you've found a solution to your problem already, there's nothing you need to do. Just ignore this message and your case will automatically close in 2 days.
Didn't see the reply until the 3rd day.
> As we have not heard from you in the last 2 days your case has been closed automatically.
I think people, even on HN, grossly underestimate how much customer service costs at any major company that works with the public.
Most calls to customer service are easily self-serviceable. My brother used to work for X-Box Live support, and he said over half his calls were for password resets, something people could easily do on their X-Box.
But then there's bad actors. Another significant chunk of his calls were from people complaining about being banned, and he'd see the reports of their spamming racial slurs.
Not to mention how many people try to abuse customer support in attempts to take over someone else's account.
Yeah...customer service is expensive. Even if you automate as much as you can, but offer an appeal process, that appeal process with be absolutely abused by bad actors, so that will end up automated as well.
No. The default API quota is not large enough to upload videos. You would have to contact Google, explain your use case, and jump through several hoops to get the quota increased... which is a huge process.
Yeah. Uploading legit videos is non-trivial. And if you ever upload the same video twice (which you think you might do during testing, right?), it's a violation of their terms and they disable your access.
Do you know if there is any open source tools in this field that a programmer can work with/automate, I have mainly textual and graphic content, a little bit of video, but thinking to branch out to podcasts and music soon, unfortunately the other products supporting text seem pricey and geared to big teams.
on edit: obviously I can write my own, but I am hoping for a project that has already done a bunch of things that I can extend for my needs, as writing my own would be at the point where it would be more cost benefit to purchase.
That's because Booking was also committing some type of misrepresentation and taking revenue away from Ryanair through their browser automation. Even then, the infraction was sooo bad that they got a $5k fine.
My wife hates it when 1099 her for services rendered, especially since she refuses to bill against the PO I set up for her. The kids at least accepted NET15 payment terms. Although the oldest said if I short pay him for lawn care again, he’s going to take away my early pay discount.
How does that work, though? Setting up a company has an initial cost and then recurrent costs (accountant, etc). Are the benefits that high for the average Joe?
It's hard to answer without specifics, even if you're not doing anything neferious there are a lot of benefits to putting an entity between yourself and your customers. It depends on where you live and what your business is of course.
> In November 2022 the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties.
Reminder that the earlier ruling was overturned, it is no longer clear whether scraping is legal or not.
I worked for a very early billpay company where you could pay your bills online to vendors, even if the vendor didn't support it. We used API's where we could, but where we couldn't...
We had a whole team dedicated to keeping up the changes vendors would make to their websites that we scraped for info. The team was called, of course, "Scrape and P(r)ay".
If you build your scraper to find data on the page based on the shape of the data itself instead of the structure of the page then it will be resilient to most changes that don't materially change what data is displayed on the page.
So, prefer regex over css selectors, and css selectors over xpath, where possible. And don't select based on nesting or position if possible.
Depends on your development and per-action cost. And on the possible latency. It also changes your whole stack from "send a request" to "emulate each step in a browser while taking screenshots at (hopefully) the right event/delay" - that's a huge difference.
Same experience, slightly different. It made me realise why some parts of an MBA (e.g. strategic place/partnership/spring boarding from a brand) actually have value I never saw before for tech companies. There are essentially king makers in certain fields - either by their apathy at first-movers, or their choice on who they allow to continue.
My first Saas was built around Facebook, Twitter and Reddits API.
Facebook broke like monthly and required random updates, sometimes documented, sometimes not. Zero support.
Twitter worker flawlessly until I hit some limits and there was no way to increase them because I didn't hit some other limits. No way they would talk to me.
Reddit just worked until I gave up.
What I learned is to never again do any business based on someone else.
A good lesson, but a more nuanced one is to do sure diligence. There are companies I would never build my business around (Google, Oracle, etc.) for a variety of reasons. There are ones I know I can trust (at least until they change). There are many where I need a contract.
Change is also a constant, and there are plenty of good companies give bad, and a few in reverse. So due diligence is an ongoing process.
That dramatically raises the price of SaaS, so I use it much less than mainstream industry practice, but much more than zero.
> What I learned is to never again do any business based on someone else.
That's a little dramatic, don't you think?
Supply chains are a core of many (most?) businesses out there. They depend on others to get their business done. No supply -> no business.
What you probably meant is not building a business based SOLELY on irreplaceable business relationships. Unfortunately in a lot of cases involving the tech giants and little startups, there are no alternatives.
More or less, however I really try to not build on anyone else ever again.
I can't find a single dependency in my serious money generating chain right now that isn't replaceable with a similar product within a few minutes or hours if necessary.
My most recent project didn't even last a full year as there was no replacement that worked for me for ChatGPT in that moment. It was built to die, a gamble essentially. I wouldn't waste my time for things like this if I didn't had the end calculated in already.
I am curious if you would be interested to retry the idea? I might have an in with the YouTube team. I feel like it's a shame to let this go. Would you be open to chat? Please reach out r@pehul.com
I believe I am entirely in compliance with YouTube's terms and policies, but I was flagged for some bullshit as well and got the boilerplate responses. So what I decided to do was hide it for logged out users so it looked like that specific feature was entirely removed to the dudes in India that review this stuff... One year later and my fingers are crossed we don't get another audit.
That statement is an outright lie too. Not only are they operating at less than 1% of what the free plan offered, but the email doesn't tell them the honest truth: That the free plan is reaching sunset, and they want all API users to switch to a paid plan.
This isn't unreasonable, but they absolutely should provide more than 1 business day notice.
Of course it's generic and perhaps not a technically correct statement. And now? Why should they spend time on writing you nicer emails? What was your value to them? Zero? Or is that too optimistic actually?
A dollar a day is $30/month, and at $1.99/sale that means OP would need to sell 15 apps ONLY to break even, which given the comments in the blog might be close to reality. This is pennies for both sides, but the way that Yelp distastefully contacted OP is probably worth just shutting the whole thing, it's not like OP was making bank on the app to begin with.
Throw on taxes, administrative overheads, etc, they are probably looking at 30-45 sales per month. Which is likely not realistic.
On top of that, this is a continuous payment. Even if I was looking at 5-10x rate of return, I would be very hesitant as that's the rate-of-return today while the sales are forever.
I've been wondering how realistic microsubscriptions are... Say $1-2 dollars a month per user to maintain an app, perhaps limited to just power users, would support a lot of infrastructure.
Which seems to indicate a base price of $229 per month. I have no idea why that doesn't line up with the pricing on their website. But the fact that they shared it with me indicated to me that my use case fell under some kind of "enterprise" usage. Regardless, I would not continue to work with them after 4-days notice and the threatening email. It's too small and app for it to be worth it to me.
I did ask in one of my emails about the pricing discrepancy and got no reply.
I think Apple has been developing a yelp clone internally; and have been slowly releasing bits and pieces.
Apple has added rating systems for destinations. Amenities available at location (ie, “accepts Apple Pay”, dog/cat friendly). Maybe in the next decade Yelp integration will be phased out completely
They've already got something in Maps that switches locations from Yelp reviews to the Apple thumbs up/down system once they hit some critical mass of data, and the same for location photos.
yelp had so much potential but they pissed it all away. Google brain raped them [1,2]. Then they never recovered from it.
Then there is ongoing issues between merchants and yelp [3]
Yelp used to be a great place to find some decent place to eat in a new city. But the platform
has gotten stale. Reviews are less reliable. Star rating often not useful.
> First of all, I was not “trialing” the Yelp API. I had been using it for a decade and had official permission from Yelp to create Restaurants.
This looks like a Face/Off situation to me.
(Spoiler alert for a 1997 action movie: in Face/Off a cop surgically exchanges faces with an imprisoned villain in order to go undercover in their organization, but the villain then murders everyone who knew about the swap and steals the cop's life.)
Somebody at Yelp in 2014 knew that you had been approved to build this app. That person almost certainly no longer worked at Yelp ten years later, so the institutional knowledge of that agreement had likely been lost.
Oh I completely agree - 4 days notice is _never_ OK. I get uncomfortable with 30 days notice because I've had the occasional vacation that long!
Ideally they'd have a notes field against developer apps and a robust process for recording this kind of thing - but I've worked for companies, so it doesn't surprise me at all that there's no good mechanism in place for that.
In real life, sometimes months isn't enough. On August 5, UPS will complete their API transition to OAuth based authorization after many months of process. Many of my customers haven't responded to my attempts to warn them about the change. I've resigned myself at this point to August 5 being a crazy day.
Yeah, you'd think so. But as many of us have learned, many companies can't and won't be considerate. Sorry that you got hit with it, but at least it's a quick and clean break.
Don't sweat the refunds too much (unless someone is being really rude about it). Apple certainly won't.
Btw, I'm pretty sure what happened was that this conversion was planned and carried out, but nobody was assigned the responsibility to tell developers. It was clearly done last minute using the most convenient form.
> Btw, I'm pretty sure what happened was that this conversion was planned and carried out, but nobody was assigned the responsibility to tell developers. It was clearly done last minute using the most convenient form.
Right, the biggest thing is a failure of communication. There should have been emails months ago, not 4-days (1 business day Friday->Monday) before.
There should have been an email months ago saying they were converting their API to be paid. Not a 4-day threat to shutoff your API key or pay-up. As I mentioned in my post, I was not aware that they were converting to a paid program and had received no prior emails.
Yes, I got that, but why should they bother? Your understanding is that you were business partners, while in fact, you were just lucky enough to get access to their service for some years.
If you had an actual contract, it would be a different story. Your product would still be not more than some UI to some walled garden, and nothing particularly valuable, but at least you would be officially permitted to do so.
So you basically sold something to Apple users that you don't actually own, and that is completely out of your control, and that was always in danger to just stop working suddenly.
And, on the other hand, I'm sure you've implemented a (for a hobby) decent app, and maybe you actually brought a handful of new visitors to them (which wouldn't have just used their website if your app wouldn't exist). But do you really think that at Yelp they are sitting there and just think how they can return the favor?
They basically think "well, that funny dude has now played enough". You never were a partner for them. Just what people call " useful idi*t" (sorry, but that's just the term ^^) at best. They haven't talked about you at their christmas party!
If you're up front and reasonable, you're more likely to convert developers to pay for the new API. If you do it last minute, not only can't developers make the switch in time, you've lost their trust, making it harder to convince developers to bother investing their time and resources.
Their business is completely independent from a funny guy who writes some iPhone app. They haven't lost anything in that story. If they need a new iPhone app, I'm sure they will find developers for that.
I absolutely wouldn't expect there to be notes against an API key.
Heck, in many companies I have encountered that they don't even know who is using API keys they've issued to third parties, especially over generations of systems. I am impressed that after getting email approval for an app a decade ago, Yelp still had contact details enough to let the O/P know!
None of that negates the issue of 4-days notice and Yelp shooting themselves in the foot by removing access to an app which redirects people to their website. But someone in executive management made a decision on the basis that they wanted revenue from the API overhead, wanted a slice of other people's pie and that's that.
To the O/Ps point about subscription, there was a UK food app which gave you restaurant food safety scores taken from the food safety agency "Scores on The Doors" it's gone now but I paid a few £ a year for it and never had an issue. If the Yelp pricing is sustainable at that level it's not a bad idea to pay for API access, Yelp has to pay for their servers and a portion of the API calls won't be converted to traffic. Who knows if Yelp still has a sustainable business? Maybe that API thing doesn't pay for itself? I don't know.
Maybe not for an API key, but for an account, you would think they would have some method of keeping notes. I've never worked for a company that had a concept of accounts, and teams of people that interfaced with accounts, without having a method of keeping notes about an account. That's just a basic necessity, especially when the accounts exchange money with the company, there's usually accounts that pay more than others that require special handling, which is usually documented in an account notes screen of some kind.
On the Yelp developer site you have an app profile where there is the name and description of the app. There is also a separate field for the URL of the app website, which I did have filled in. So, they have that at a minimum. If they didn't retain the records of the screenshots/communications that led to the original approval and raise of the API daily limit then that is poor recording keeping but understandable in a corporate environment after 10 years.
The API key usually has a contact email. After a year that contact email probably doesn’t work anymore, certainly for free tier.
Which underlines what I concluded long ago: the best and most durable form of identity on the internet is rooted in the ability to pay money. Any identity that is free to create is doomed.
or in the departed. Martin Sheen is the only one who knew dicaprio was undercover. With him dead the protection goes with it. Only a real contract would CYA. When a company goes from friendly to unfriendly they're happy they were 'scrappy' not to write everything down.
My first thoughts while reading the story was that their champion at Yelp quit and whoever's left didn't know/care enough about them. 10 years ago, Yelp would still be scrappy start up and there was a motivated employees willing to go outside the painted lines. Now, it's just a faceless person following orders.
> It seemed they were in fact encouraging me to finish the app and release it.
That was quite the assumption. They gave you access to something for free, not encouragement. I do feel bad for OP, but they weren't paying for the API, and should not have had any assumption that it would last forever because there was no contract or terms or anything. This is the risk we take by building our house on someone else's foundation.
The gist I got from my communications with them 10 years ago was that they were encouraging me to finish it.
I agree with you there was no expectation of it being free forever. I never said there was. What was unreasonable was the 4-days notice that it was coming to an end. That's just not enough time.
Depending on what kind of approvals they gave him 10 years ago, it MIGHT be possible that doing this violates a contract. It sounds like they had some kind of understanding when they gave him access that he had some sort of informal approval. Even if nothing was signed, that still forms a contract. Even if there was a formal contract or terms of service (TOS) agreement, there are certain restrictions around when and how a company can change their TOS. In particular, there's often requirements about how much advance notice has to be given if the terms of service change.
It sounds like the monetary stakes are pretty small, but depending on the author's desire, it might be worth doing some research and potentially going to small claims court and claiming damages for those customers that requested refunds.
> It sounds like the monetary stakes are pretty small, but depending on the author's desire, it might be worth doing some research and potentially going to small claims court and claiming damages for those customers that requested refunds.
Yes, the monetary stakes are too small for it to be worth it for me to pursue. I could probably dig up some old emails from 10+ years ago but it just wouldn't be worth it. Exposing this kind of bad behavior (4-days notice!) is enough.
It sounds like he requested API access in order to make a native Mac application for Yelp. The specifics matter a lot here, but “if you develop a native Mac application for Yelp, we’ll give you free API access” sounds a lot like consideration. That could be completely false based on exactly how that went down, of course.
> Developing an app to use someone's free API is not an exchange of consideration.
I would never pursue anything further over this app that had about $2,000 of revenue over 10 years. That said, for the record there was consideration.
I had to go through an official approval process that required providing evidence of the app's functionality and a few emails back and forth. I think I actually sent them a prototype of it. And based on that process they decided how many daily API calls to give me. A normal free user did not receive 25,000 API calls per day. I believe if you didn't go through approval back then you got something like 1,000 per month. So there was a consideration process on their part and a determination to green light my use case.
You could argue that the indefinite API access was in exchange for writing the app (service for service), but if this were me, I probably wouldn't bother. Maybe I'd write an adversarial-interoperability backend to replace the API, or open-source the app to allow other interested parties to do so. Or maybe I'd just say "It was a nice run", and let it die.
If you care enough to send a polite email, you could say that Yelp has a prior agreement, you'd appreciate them not reneging, and if they do, you'd appreciate compensation for your labour (minus, of course, the money you made from the software). Probably won't go anywhere, but…
Oh thank you for that clarification. That's very interesting, but of course it is not worth it to me to pursue for the reasons mentioned in the post and the comments here on HN.
Yeah I think the only option in which this would make sense for you to peruse legal action is in small claims court for however much you had to pay in refunds. It’s fairly easy to do that pro se (representing yourself). And often companies are motivated to negotiate if they are sued in small claims, because just sending a lawyer to represent them would cost as much, if not more than just paying the damages. Obviously this depends a lot of jurisdiction and the specifics.
But at that point it’s not a question of cost, it’s a question of how much of your time and headache you want to spend. So yeah, probably not worth it
granting API access in excess of the free tier would most likely constitute something of value, but yeah - probably wouldn't bother, it would be expensive to pursue and not worth it.
Officially, yes, something of value. In practice, just something.
> To my mind the acquiring and delivering of the [used chocolate bar] wrappers was
certainly part of the consideration in these cases, and I see no good reason
for drawing a distinction between these and other cases. — Lord Reid
> It is said that when received the wrappers are of no
value to Nestlé’s. This I would have thought irrelevant. A contracting
party can stipulate for what consideration he chooses. A peppercorn does
not cease to be good consideration if it is established that the promisee
does not like pepper and will throw away the corn. — Lord Somervell of Harrow
Not forever, no. But usually with any sort of contract, when one side wants to break or alter the contract they have to give the other side adequate notice. In certain circumstances a contract can eliminate such a requirement, and the definition of “adequate” would vary a lot based on specifics, but that is very much a possibility in this case.
What's needed to form a contract is an offer, acceptance, and consideration - if an offer was made and accepted and something of value was exchanged, and there wasn't confusion about the terms (after 10 years, there wouldn't be), that's good enough for a contract to have legal force.
Seen this story play out so many times. I audited a company years ago that claimed to have excellent, personal almost, relationship with Google and all needed paperwork to use their platform as a core of their business. They went bust 6 months after because of "unexpected" change of Google's product strategy.
Real lesson here is to avoid single points of failure, regardless if it's API, people or partners. Ask yourself a question if there's a single entity that can kill your business and remove that reliance.
If you're depending on the continued existence of any Google product beyond GMail, Google Cloud and advertising you should really consider fallback positions. The existence of Youtube is also guaranteed, but the existence of any particular API or service that you might depend on? Not so much. Hell they'd probably consider killing GMail if they didn't need the accounts to tie advertising impressions to individuals.
Google used to need Search in order to learn about the intimate details of our lives. It's how they knew what we were interested in, what our medical problems were, what we were learning, and what we were thinking about.
Now they have chrome giving google people's entire browsing history, android devices collecting realtime data on what people are doing offline, where they are and who they are with. Google also has products like fitbit, nest, and gmail that gather still more data for google. Google doesn't need Search to spy on us anymore, so they haven't invested in keeping it useful.
In fact, it's better for google if you can't find what you want and have to make multiple searches for information because it gives them more chances to throw ads at you, and the harder it is for people to find websites using Search the more sites might feel like they have no choice but to pay Google to keep them at the top of the search results.
People who find Search increasingly useless though are turning to alternatives and for many people AI could end up replacing google's Search product as the first thing they turn to.
I would not count on Search staying around forever.
It's not as if they can't/don't also push ads at people in gmail, in youtube, Google maps, on android devices (phones, TVs, chromebooks, etc), in chrome, and they still have AdMob and AdSense and the Google Display Network
They need search for different reasons: it's their biggest moat against Meta by being the start page of the internet for a great many number of people. A whole lot of browsing sessions start with search and end with search, and this way Google can claim attribution for virtually every traffic a website gets outside of direct hits.
This keeps people developing content to please Google and running ads on Google platforms to get more traffic.
Yup. Search is gradually (for about 15 years now) being transitioned from a search feature to a self-serve ad-requesting platform. “Show up, type a term, and we will select 10 ads for you.”
> for many people AI could end up replacing google's Search product
The quality of Google search lately has felt pretty meh, especially for generic topics that get hits for crummy blogspam. Google’s own AI results at the top are pretty much the thing keeping me there atm aside from inertia. My personal browser is on DDG which is fine just a tad slow comparatively
That's a ton of money, (and I've heard that they paid Apple even more last year) but it's kind of understandable. Apple customers don't usually have android phones snitching on them, are less likely to use chrome, and tend to have their devices and data in the Apple ecosystem. Google has fewer ways to spy on Apple user's lives and push ads at them. Search, gmail, and youtube probably give them the best opportunities. I wouldn't doubt that Apple users are getting as frustrated with Google's search engine as everyone else is though.
That is only half-true. On the one hand, I agree and I would never build a serious business on another single entity. But on the other hand, OP built an app that ran successfully for 10 years, generating some revenue.
Most products have an expected expiration date and you can provide a useful service (that generates revenue) by building on other platforms, even if it won't last forever.
By now I missed more opportunities by having the mindset of "not relying on other people's APIs" than real changes/shutdowns would warrant this kind of caution.
That's not going to work in practice as money and time are limited. Choose your partners wisely but don't obsess over the scenario of them going bankrupt.
It's so sad that we're at such a devoid barren state.
There was so much hype & excitement in web2 age, about APIs & intertwingularity. Humanity was going to keep improving & iterating & crafting ever neater ideas.
Now it's all bureaucracy & lawyers arrayed to defend the cloud-keeps, moats & walls.
The user & agency of the world has been steady dimished, eroded away by ever advancing legal IP Protectionism.
I think the general lack of willingness to help in Big Tech is very problematic. You can almost never get through those thick-skulled reps that email you out of the blue...
The problem is that by having a thick-skulled rep walk in and send a few e-mails, Yelp has already lost more money on API customer acquisition than the app developer was willing to pay. That's why these APIs had free tiers: they covered these kinds of micro-usages that would be far too cheap for a sales rep to cover.
The reason why those free tiers went away is that AI came along. Not so much that the AI scrapers were abusing Yelp free tier[0], but that they could. And once companies realized how much money was floating around in selling data access, non-abusive free tier users went from "a cool goodwill gesture" to "freeloading parasites".
David Kopec and Restauraunts got steamrolled in a case of technological gentrification. If you're selling data access for $TOO_CHEAP_TO_METER/call to a random indie, Apple, Google, and/or Microsoft will use that as a comparable for why Yelp should charge peanuts. Or they'll just acquihire him. They need him and his app to go away because he is inconvenient to the long-term valuation plan of Yelp, an old guard Web 2.0 business that never quite became sovereign.
[0] Though, to be clear, AI scrapers are absolutely abusive in general.
> You can almost never get through those thick-skulled reps that email you out of the blue...
He did get through to the sales rep. The responses are directly in the article. The sales rep responded within hours and showed him how to sign up for the free trial option to extend the free usage period longer while he decided.
> He did get through to the sales rep. The responses are directly in the article. The sales rep responded within hours and showed him how to sign up for the free trial option to extend the free usage period longer while he decided.
> What more would you want the rep to do?
Not send a threatening, inaccurate email with a 4-day (1 business day Friday->Monday) deadline in the first place?
Also for the record, this was not a sales manager. This was someone in "growth" that sent the email. I guess maybe that just means "sales."
> Your API usage is higher than lots of other Yelp Fusion developers
You're right it wasn't just inaccurate it was outright deceptive, trying to frame this as something specific to OP that he is responsible for rather than a change in their business applying to all API users.
Employ a shred of critical thinking and realize this app probably drives more value to Yelp than the cost to run the API, and flag it for an exception.
Customer service or sales people like that are usually at the lowest point on the totem pole. It’s likely that they have zero leeway, either you’re gonna pay exorbitantly or you’re out. It’s an institutional problem.
In that case it's not customer service but a customer firewall. If the CS employees are not empowered to induce solutions even if they benefit both the customers and the company then they are literally useless.
And yes, many companies have "customer service" like that designed to waste your time until you go away. That doesn't mean it's the only possible way.
Amazon’s AWS has good customer service. I get good customer service at the Apple Store, and I also got good customer service when Microsoft had retail stores. I have used Azure’s customer service and it was OK. Amazon’s AWS is know for outstanding customer service. My main point is some big tech companies have terrible service. Some don’t.
I meant, if you have the ability to initiate a chargeback (pay money, and have the ability to take it back out of their control for bad service), then they will probably provide customer service.
A couple years ago, I was confused about why my Apple TV remote was behaving weirdly, and a few taps in the support app and I had a real person call me and fix my issue within minutes.
I was looking for a completely random Molex adapter from the early 1980's for a hobby project. After reaching out to the company they had someone call me and attempt to help. They didn't find the part (since it hasn't existed for 30 years) but they did give me some good leads.
I'd like to see how someone can see a directly employed Google support agent / repair technician in person for support like you can with the Genius Bar.
Additionally, as far as I know, the kind of support you get calling AppleCare is unmatched by anyone else.
But Yelp is not big tech, certainly not by market cap. It could be old tech, in the way that a 2010-era data API may have been a growth hack intended to create an app ecosystem. But 10 years later, there’s no app ecosystem and the company can’t afford to support a (stagnant) lone indie developer. Especially in the current era of LLM scrapers.
Probably what happened was 1 support rep helped you out but did it through some undocumented backdoor to unblock you and not a formal contract. Later a completely unrelated set of employees are tasked with figuring out who the biggest API users are and to either cut them loose or get them to start paying.
Yes, this was surely somewhat tied to employee turnover and poor record keeping. But I was almost certainly not one of the "biggest API users."
The thing is, regardless of the turnover or situation, 4-days (actually 1-business day Friday->Monday) is not a reasonable timeframe to threaten to shutoff someone's API key who hasn't violated any terms of service. They have the right to do it, but it doesn't make you want to work with them in the future.
Drama aside, the guy signed up for the free Yelp API 10 years ago, which has since been discontinued. He was offered the option to switch to a paid API, which he chose not to consider.
Yes, Yelp was a bit clumsy in handling this, but discontinuing the free API after 10 years is totally within their rights. The developer didn't even bother getting their pricing proposal, which might have been totally reasonable (or not), considering his app is paid.
I guess you didn't read my blog post because I addressed everything you wrote. The issue is not that it went paid, it's the 4-days notice. They are perfectly in their right to start charging for their API, they just can't give us 4-days notice.
Well they can do whatever timeframe they want of course. And I can write about how rude it is. 4-days (really 1-business day in the original email Friday->Monday) is not a reasonable timeframe within which to threaten to cutoff an app with real users.
Just killing your app is an emotional, not a rational, decision. You have a human responding to your emails, so here's a business way to handle this situation:
Dear Yelp,
Your decision to discontinue the free API was unexpected, and it’s difficult for me to switch to the new one within the given very short 4-day timeframe. Not only is this not enough time to estimate how your new API pricing will affect my business model, but it also requires some engineering work to switch my app to the new API.
Given my 10-year history of working with Yelp, I would appreciate it if you could send me your new pricing proposal ASAP and also give me some time to consider it. If accepted, I would need additional time to implement it.
It's just not worth it. I have a full-time job and many other projects and apps I am supporting. I don't want to work with a company that provides long-term API users 4-days notice about a major change and threatens to cut you off in that time period. As you saw in the blog post I did write back to them and did not get any kind of response indicating flexibility (did you read my whole post?).
Also, the money is very very low stakes. This app sells dozens of copies a year. Not hundreds or thousands. It's just not worth it financially. It sold 467 copies over 10 years. People who used it loved it, but it's not a money maker.
> I don't want to work with a company that provides long-term API users 4-days notice about a major change and threatens to cut you off in that time period.
If you don't want to deal with the slightest inconvenience don't run a business and don't take money from customers. You owe it to your users to care at least a bit.
> If you don't want to deal with the slightest inconvenience don't run a business and don't take money from customers. You owe it to your users to care at least a bit.
I did care "at least a bit" which is why I kept updating the app for 10-years despite it not making almost any money. How many indie apps survive that long? But based on the pricing they quoted me it would be a money-losing venture to continue (see slide 3 base monthly fee $229 from the deck they sent me):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
And we have to decide what we work on when we are just one person. If it's money-losing and they don't treat you well it might not make sense to keep doing it.
That said, as I expressed in the blog post I do feel really bad for any of the users that bought the app and I want all of them to get a refund from Apple as explained in the post. They can use these directions:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/118223
He's didn't argue it wasn't within their rights. He called them "quite rude", which seems hard to deny.
No matter the rate Yelp set, the apps economics no longer make sense. The existing customers, already paid, and he has no way to transition them to a subscription.
No problem. He can just dust off his business contract with Yelp and have the courts set them straight. No contract? Then why would one expect the world to cater to their whim. Yelp promised nothing and he got exactly what they promised.
He mentions 100 API calls per day. If Yelp offered him a rate of a fraction of a cent per call, it might be a negligible expense that could be offset by past or future sales.
If the app has outlived its lifecycle, the end of the free API might be a signal to retire it. Blaming Yelp and making a drama out of it seems a bit much. Suppose they had given him 30 days instead of 4; would his decision really be any different?
> Suppose they had given him 30 days instead of 4; would his decision really be any different?
Possibly not, but the point of OP's complaint is that Yelp was rude, handled it poorly, and gave him an unreasonably short deadline. No one is arguing that Yelp doesn't have the right to discontinue free API access, or that OP's business model was a good and sustainable one.
But agreed: if OP could have gotten a rate that would have cost, say, 10 cents per day (or even more, like 50 cents or a dollar a day), maybe that would have been ok. And maybe he could have changed the pricing on the app for future purchasers to a subscription model, some small token amount like $1/mo or even $5/year.
But also consider it's pretty crappy to give someone such a short amount of time to make the decision as to whether or not that new business model would work, and if it's worth it to put more development effort into the app to enable that new pricing scheme.
Well, don't read the comment that you reply on. ;)
The only interesting part of the story is to what extent others actually learn sth from it (that lesson should be trivial, but nowadays it obviously is all but common sense). And I guess: Not very much. They will 'give a fuck' here how bad the world and all is, and then continue in their naive way tomorrow.
There's a tangible difference between shitting on a person who chooses to share an experience, and shitting on a person who is shitting on a person who shared an experience. If you choose to read irony or hypocrisy in it, that's your own issues with context. ;)
> He mentions 100 API calls per day. If Yelp offered him a rate of a fraction of a cent per call, it might be a negligible expense that could be offset by past or future sales.
Except, elsewhere in this thread:
> the prices they quoted were ridiculously high (thousands of dollars a month).
I got the same email. Despite my hobby project (a random food picker) having been broken and not used for years (because of yelp API updates), they also told me my usage was higher than other developers...
The email also arrived in my spam folder, so I was lucky to even see it. Once I got back to them they did increase the cutoff by a few days but it has since been stopped.
Interesting and an excellent read. The death spiral at Travelocity (pre-Expedia acquisition) worked differently and was partially self-induced.
Some background is required first. Travelocity was the first online travel agency (OTA). I believe they started around 1996.
Through most of its life at that point all, I mean 95%+, of its success came from only two factors: best marketing in industry and growth of the internet. This is severely problematic because marketing only gets you so far in business. Conversely Expedia had really shitty marketing in comparison and yet came to dominate the industry because they were extremely aggressive at growing their supplier relations.
You cannot EVER rely on growth of media adoption, like mom and pop coming online, because once that stops you have no fuel left in the tank. Reliance on growth of a media platform is like a gravy train that you did nothing to build and returns amazing wealth if you are in the right place at the right time, but once it stagnates its like your train derails and everybody dies. That is because everybody expects growth to continue, except you did nothing to earn the growth and now have no answers and nothing to show for it. This was around later 2008 when I joined the company and became unavoidably obvious to everybody over the next year.
So, at that point what do you do? You competitors are far out pacing you by ignoring fun stuff, marketing, technology, and all the other bullshit that technology people look to. Instead they are focusing on core business principles and eating your golden goose while laughing at you. So, what do you do?
In the case of Travelocity all the executives leave. New executives come into trying to figure out what to do. Like every great web business they focus more aggressively on marketing and advertising. This was Travelocity's death spiral.
You have to understand that people DO NOT like advertisements. Really, I know its surprising, but when your site becomes littered with advertisements everywhere and all kinds of hidden telemetry people will leave and never come back. Your wonderful palace has become a trailer park.
The business loves advertising. Revenue from advertisements is immediate. That is really significant. In e-commerce there is a massive lag between each stage of profit, revenue, and sales because you have to account for the cost of operations, sales, and inventory. The more expensive the product the longer the lag and that lag really complicates projections. So advertisements are like cocaine, because they immediately return profit that requires no effort while rotting your health slowly until you are a hollow skeleton.
To be fair they were doing amazing things with inventory and pricing that was vastly superior to what the competition was doing after the leadership turn over. This was too little too late though. These innovations could have saved the business provided more time and the same level of discipline, but not when you are already in a death spiral.
My learning from this is that a business that earns profit from selling something directly should not fuck up conversion or go out of its way to make customers hate them. When I put that way it sounds obvious, but web business get that wrong all the time because they get distracted by shiny things.
>To be fair they were doing amazing things with inventory and pricing that was vastly superior to what the competition was doing after the leadership turn over. This was too little too late though. These innovations could have saved the business provided more time and the same level of discipline, but not when you are already in a death spiral.
So in the travel industry you have limited lines of business, primarily: air, hotels, and car rentals. Air is super low margin because its set directly by the supplier plus some arbitrary service fee, typically $7 per ticket. Air is high volume though and is the primary draw for OTA customers, so it cannot be ignored. Rental cars are super low priority because they are both low margin and low volume.
The real interest in the travel agency business is on hotel inventory. This is how Expedia came to dominate the industry, because they aggressively hired geographically focused hotel relationship personnel and Travelocity wasn't keeping up. So Expedia had much greater inventory from various different properties and stronger relationships with those properties for their business prioritization. Hotels, typically hate dealing with OTAs, because OTAs are a transparent barrier between the hotel and the guest staying at the hotel, but the OTAs bring people to the properties. The name of the game for hotels is "heads in beds" and while up-selling is beneficial if you get the "heads in beds" part wrong you cannot exist.
The margin on hotel properties is much higher and highly variable. Hotels in many cases will even eat the cost of airfare to get heads in beds if the pricing is right. That provides a huge opportunity for a marriage between smart hotel systems and OTAs because the hotels are doing the smarter inventory management and the OTAs are supplying the airfare volume and customers to populate that smart inventory management. The hotel data systems, Property Management Systems (PMS), were at that time much smarter than the inventory availability OTAs had, because they had to do much more to account for seasonal volume planning and various customer demands.
Where Travelocity was strong was in writing algorithms to account for these considerations and offer volume pricing discounts the competition could not and also air + hotel package pricing at massive discounts the competition could not compete with. In parallel Travelocity was slowly building up a corporate travel business to take advantage of that volume pricing intelligence and at one point had both WalMart and Lockheed-Martin as customers.
Again, both of those were amazing and could have really helped retake lost market, but conquering competition is a fragile slow process while advertising is immediate.
> they also told me my usage was higher than other developers...
I'm curious to what they compare this. The non-existent free plan where everything higher than 0 is unusual. Or a large mass of dead accounts who have really zero to none usage. Or the actually paying account who are now on their enterprise plan. In the later case, this might indicate some real problem if their usage is low enough that smaller projects are already exceptional.
They never answered my question about the discrepancy between these prices and the prices on their website. Both would be too high to make Restaurants low sales sustainable.
That said, I'll say again that they were perfectly in their right to start charging for their API. They just should not have done so with 4-days notice and with such a threatening email.
$10 per request at the lowest tier of enhanced?! The only business case I can think of for this is if you save all the data in your own database then serve requests for your own service out of your own cache. I guess if the Yelp data doesn't change very often, then you just choose to stay 6-months behind on the data or something...
Hang on, they didn't give his app 4 days - they gave him 4 days to respond with some screenshots, and if he didn't respond, they would shut down his access. They didn't say they'll shut it down in 4 days regardless.
I mean, don't take this as me defending Yelp - they're scumbags, and deserve any hate coming their way - but I don't think that the headline is an accurate description of what happened.
I did respond with the required information and they still shut down my access (10-days post though, not 4-days in the end). But regardless, no, I don't think sending you a request on a Friday for information due on a Monday or shutting down all of your access is reasonable. As I mentioned in my post, what if I had been on vacation? 1-business day or shut you down is just not a reasonable time frame to make anyone want to work with you in the future.
Why don't you just stop dreaming that dream of Yelp and Facebook being interested in working with you? I knooow, it's a nice dream, and you all dream it since 15yrs, and have brought a lot of damage to the world this way. But please be rational for a moment. In all these contexts, you are product!! Not more and not less... They don't want to work with you. And if they pretend to, it's for some strategical reasons, and of limited time. What they want is to sell you! But they reaaaly don't need your funny app for that. Are you actually surprised that they want to have their users in their own UI instead of yours? C'mon??
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadIt’s understandable they went to paid. What’s not understandable is the 4 days notice and tone of the email.
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
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)
thanks
but the author pointed out that it drove traffic to Yelp, and that almost certainly seems to be true.
In fact, little integration plays like this app might have been the only thing keeping Yelp sort-of alive after Google got into the game.
Killing off your bizdev partners seems incredibly short-sighted and foolish. (Also, feeding the reviews into an AI... for what, exactly? To train a model on how to write reviews? Or perhaps to detect fake reviews -- actually, that was an issue on Yelp even before AI, so it seems like it wouldn't be the best training content.)
Even leaving out that it was with only a grotesquely unprofessional four day notice, this is ridiculous. It's not like Yelp was suffering a DDoS from all of those API calls.
To wit, there is exactly one business strategy: When you are small, be nice. When you are big, pull that ladder up behind you.
I'd add a "in venture capital and big capital" after "business strategy". When you don't have VCs or the stonk market breathing down your neck all the time, incentives massively change.
IMHO, there is only one solution left... once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust that has a clear mandate to run its companies in a way beneficial to society at large. That way the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on countless r&d experiments, VC investors have a perspective to payout, and the world gets kept from utter bullshit like API games.
Of course when WSB makes jokes about it and catapults a junk stock like GME to ridiculous heights, squeezing shortsellers dry, it's pretty funny to watch. But it gets problematic when just about everyone's pension is tied to "stonks go up" as well. That leads to all sorts of perverse incentives.
Just look at Boeing and how far they've fallen. Twice in recent years, literally and not just proverbially, with hundreds dead as the inevitable consequence of stonk market games.
I tend to agree, though I don't think I'd go so far as to think someone saying "stonk" has "lost all credibility"... but to me, it's like Republicans deliberately mispronouncing Kamala Harris' first name, because they can, and because their base eats it up. It's a cheap shot, and it feels childish, like you don't have a real argument, so instead you act like an elementary school kid on the playground calling the other kid names.
Exactly all of this.
If you expect the government to make a tender offer on the largest market-cap companies, they sure as heck _are_ paying for r&d indirectly. And a lot more!
> once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust
Interesting, haven't heard that one. I'll say maybe. I'd rather have Facebook not exist at all than have it be an *official* arm of the NSA
Or, perhaps more simply, The Oatmeal's Reaching People on the Internet: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
Things are starting to flip. Increasingly, people would rather have access to the raw dataset to pipe into an LLM. The question, as always, is how to control this access and charge people accordingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
But this case seems to be funny at least (acc to your text): A YT link about the 'old, open web'. YMMD!
So now not only is AI filling the web with garbage that poisons future model development[1], it provides incentive to further close and wall off access to (user-provided!) data.
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
That said... I think API policies are also vestiges of a defunct idea set that prevailed circa 2009.
At that time, "twitter is a protocol." APIs and openness were going to be the new worldwideweb. Social media was going to be an ecosystem of independent apps and services with complex interactions mitigated by protocols.
YC even did an "rfs" recruiting startups to build off the twitter API.
That didn't happen, but APIs intended to enable it were already in the wild.
As API access becomes strategic again (because AI), "why do we even have this?" is likely to come up.
https://www.dailydot.com/via/yelp-extortion-lawsuit/
https://cutthroatmarketing.com/heres-why-you-shouldnt-advert...
https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/h9ohs6/has_a...
(Anecdotally, I also seem to be seeing this on Google Maps now! It seems like highly rated but local restaurants don't even show up on the map at all until I zoom in literally to the building -- perhaps because the owners don't pay for ads? Crazy if true... and Bing maps seem to not have all the restaurants or ratings, and you can't seem to filter based on rating either, which seems like a massive Bing fail. Maybe the review apps were always destined to crumble under a business model that encourages dishonesty on both sides..)
Anyway, tl;dr: I think they're working on replacing Yelp.
Imagine a landowner who allows public access to hikers using defined trails but no overnight camping. That's legal and just has to be posted. If you don't like it, don't use it.
SerpAPI is a convenient wrapper API for scraping various sites. I assume they've vetted all the legality of things. They have a YouTube API: https://serpapi.com/yelp-search-api
They claim they did: https://serpapi.com/blog/scraping-public-pages-legality/
Still they have a boilerplate ToS with some glaring mistakes:
> These Terms of Service and any separate agreements whereby we provide you Services shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of 5540 N Lamar Blvd #12, Austin, TX, 78756, United States. (sic)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.
In that case, the court found 3Taps was criminally guilty for scraping publicly available craigslist data while logged out because 3Taps knew their use was not authorized.
This person has just received an email from Yelp telling them their free usage is not authorized, so circumventing that may well be illegal, now that they've been given that sort of communication, even if it might be questionably legal for other serpapi users.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3221625
Related to the earlier "old & grumpy" 3rd party API post, I've seen far too many, otherwise, outstanding businesses held hostage and summarily executed by either sudden un-explained usage-tier/throttling policies without economic recompense or the outright deactivation of API keys w/o notice or explanation.
> if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you are at their whim.
That's the money quote, there. I avoid using third-party APIs like the plague. I have written backend aggregators and facias, to avoid having to use the API.
I Just. Will. Not. embed an opaque codeball into my app. I'm a cranky old bastard, I know, but I sleep well at night.
In a competitive market John Doe would go to one of googles competitors. We don't have a competitive market. We have winner takes all market.
I agree, Google has swallowed up the video streaming market unfortunately.
I keep thinking back to how Vine was basically TikTok, and they threw it away.
Google made $300B last year. "billions over the long haul" is a lot of money, an unimaginable amount even, to you and I. But to Google?
No, Google made $73.795B last year. Revenue is not profit, net income is profit and what you ‘make’ as a company.
Revenue is not profit.
Companies get to write off expenses of existing
People don't
Your assets might inflate in value, but that's nothing to do with the mortgage
Second there is lots of revenue you use for "business" because you don't want to pay taxes on the profit and anyway it is giving you something you like to have.
How much of Google's revenue is used to do things for top executives and people with power in the company that is really something they (the executives) should be taxed on but is instead a business expense of google (cars, transport, 'working' vacations, security, super cool chefs preparing meals at the company...) Hard to say really because if you knew the answer it would actually be something they were taxed on. But it's not 0 - sure probably not a billion, but a couple hundred million splashed around wouldn't surprise me.
How much of Google's revenue usage is for wages and other forms of payout to executives etc. (stock) that does not get counted as profit but of course it is amounts those people want to have.
Google made $73.795B profit last year, and expensed slightly over 262B - some portion of which the people who run Google no doubt personally thought of the way we would consider profit in our day to day existence, and another portion of which were fines for things they did in getting the rest of the money.
Literally the other stuff is relevant for how remunerative the people who actually run the companies, day-to-day, feel those companies are (put in day-to-day because I got the feeling you might give me a lecture about the shareholders actually running the company)
1. I know it's revenue - the GP says The impact on google losing $10m of revenue
2. Do you think the 10m that Google would have booked from API usage would be booked as pure profit?
Google makes enough money that losing several currently non-existent revenue streams that are theoretically $10 million apiece isn’t hurting them. It’s hurting their users.
Google is all about ads - why would they give a shit about the users?
If you want competitive market in a capitalist economy, then you need very active state enforcement.
Empirically this absolutely isn't the case; the majority of listed companies have fairly low margins, especially non-tech companies, which can be trivially seen from their financial statements. A low profit margin means a competitive market (because if it wasn't a competitive market the firm could raise its prices to obtain higher margins).
Not necessarily: if prices are elastic then even a monopoly can aim for low profit margin (in percentage) in order to increase profit. What matters is how much total profit are being made, margin only matters when measuring risk.
Also, corporations are social structures, and low competition also encourage complacency in the corporate structure itself, which drives costs up and reduces profit margin.
They are now hemorrhaging search to OpenAI that popped into public existence just recently.
To claim there isn’t competition in these markets is completely ignorant. “A big player eats 80%” isn’t anything like a monopoly/duopoly scenario where there literally isn’t any competition or product advancement for decades.
If you wanna see lack of competition, look at government granted monopolies on utilities. Guaranteed but capped rates means you reduce investment right to $0 and cut costs as much as possible since there is no other way to make money. That “state enforcement” you are calling for is how you end up with PG&E and scenarios like all insurances companies pulling out of the state.
Please tell me how many “product advancement” in Google search or YouTube over the past decade… From a consumer's perspective all that happened was enshitification and despite being owned by a search engine company, YouTube never managed to ship a functional search on their platform.
> If you wanna see lack of competition, look at government granted monopolies on utilities.
Utilities are “natural monopolies” though, and as such they should be state owned. Making a natural monopoly owned for profit is a recipe for rent seeking, and that's why it was promoted …
> That “state enforcement” you are calling for
No, the state enforcement I'm calling for is proper enforcement of antitrust laws, forbidding consolidation through M&A and disbanding companies megacorps. That is to say, what existed in US's golden age.
Phew, here I was stressing out about lack of competition, but you helped me relax.
Google has to invest into Youtube lest it loses out to Twitch (Amazon), Netflix ($35bn per year), HBO Max (Warner Bros, $50bn per year), (Amazon) Prime, Plus (Disney, $90bn per year).
My faith in humanity is restored now that there are alternatives.
From other MegaCorps.
I picked well-known names as examples. There are thousands and thousands of niche providers.
Claiming that this is a competitive market is a joke.
I’d argue that, on the contrary, it seems to be all the rage lately.
As for the actual anticompetitive power of big tech, absolute crickets.
It isn't much, but I'd like to see that as a start.
no, it's not, see declining marginal utility of wealth
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishin...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility...
Provide a selection of restaurants within a 1km radius and automagically provide 3 recommendations based on my preferences.
We had multiple API providers available, Tabelog, Gurunavi and Hotpepper, all required a paid developer license. We still needed to use the Google maps API to get the user's current location though.
This was also just when Google Maps suddenly raised their API pricing. After spending a couple of weekends building a working prototype, we stopped as we couldn't justify the cost of paying multiple API providers for basically 3 guys looking to save 10 mins deciding where to get lunch.
Also, this kind of app is a common theme if you frequent meetups in Tokyo. There's always at least 1 person that has built such a thing.
I’m sure as somebody who actually built a prototype, you understand the situation better than me, but I’m curious: why would just getting the user’s lat/long require anything you’d pay for? Wouldn’t the OS or browser provide that to you?
We were just testing the abilities of the various APIs. Google was the only that provided travelling time estimates.
(The dev community thread is full of people still impacted, so I think they literally just edited our app's flags directly.)
Even tried to invoke GDPR's rights to be exempt from automatic decision making, but their privacy questions email address responds with "nope fuck off" to those.
There are often complaints here about what amounts to bean counting affecting other aspects of business. Customer service at larger scale is costly so attracts a section of very analytical leaders. They don't get, or ever prioritize, the human elements. It's only when satisfaction numbers are bad, or another exec outside of customer service takes action, that things improve.
The scale part kills the customer. You can have great support at one size. Once you grow then leadership, structure, and the culture change. These analytical leaders don't want to carry over the culture and structure because it comes at a cost. It really needs force and support from outside of customer support leadership to maintain it.
Emailed support about it on 13/07/2024.
Got back a reply on 23/07/2024:
> Our Support Team is currently experiencing high case volumes, so we are reaching out with a message to check-in and make sure you still need help!
> If you've found a solution to your problem already, there's nothing you need to do. Just ignore this message and your case will automatically close in 2 days.
Didn't see the reply until the 3rd day.
> As we have not heard from you in the last 2 days your case has been closed automatically.
Excellent customer experience.
I think people, even on HN, grossly underestimate how much customer service costs at any major company that works with the public.
Most calls to customer service are easily self-serviceable. My brother used to work for X-Box Live support, and he said over half his calls were for password resets, something people could easily do on their X-Box.
But then there's bad actors. Another significant chunk of his calls were from people complaining about being banned, and he'd see the reports of their spamming racial slurs.
Not to mention how many people try to abuse customer support in attempts to take over someone else's account.
Yeah...customer service is expensive. Even if you automate as much as you can, but offer an appeal process, that appeal process with be absolutely abused by bad actors, so that will end up automated as well.
Why get Google/YouTube's permission at all about this?
on edit: obviously I can write my own, but I am hoping for a project that has already done a bunch of things that I can extend for my needs, as writing my own would be at the point where it would be more cost benefit to purchase.
I think the hiQ Labs vs LinkedIn case is a better representation that scraping is generally allowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
Reminder that the earlier ruling was overturned, it is no longer clear whether scraping is legal or not.
(I gave you an upvote, I don't think your comment deserve to be nuked for bringing up a possible legal risk)
True, but it is an API that they can't easily deprecate on a whim.
[0] https://www.kadoa.com/
We had a whole team dedicated to keeping up the changes vendors would make to their websites that we scraped for info. The team was called, of course, "Scrape and P(r)ay".
So, prefer regex over css selectors, and css selectors over xpath, where possible. And don't select based on nesting or position if possible.
And that lesson is don't base your business model around playing in someone else's waled garden.
Funnily, if I understood correctly, he already had that lesson with Facebook. Let's see what comes next...
Facebook broke like monthly and required random updates, sometimes documented, sometimes not. Zero support.
Twitter worker flawlessly until I hit some limits and there was no way to increase them because I didn't hit some other limits. No way they would talk to me.
Reddit just worked until I gave up.
What I learned is to never again do any business based on someone else.
Change is also a constant, and there are plenty of good companies give bad, and a few in reverse. So due diligence is an ongoing process.
That dramatically raises the price of SaaS, so I use it much less than mainstream industry practice, but much more than zero.
That's a little dramatic, don't you think?
Supply chains are a core of many (most?) businesses out there. They depend on others to get their business done. No supply -> no business.
What you probably meant is not building a business based SOLELY on irreplaceable business relationships. Unfortunately in a lot of cases involving the tech giants and little startups, there are no alternatives.
I can't find a single dependency in my serious money generating chain right now that isn't replaceable with a similar product within a few minutes or hours if necessary.
My most recent project didn't even last a full year as there was no replacement that worked for me for ChatGPT in that moment. It was built to die, a gamble essentially. I wouldn't waste my time for things like this if I didn't had the end calculated in already.
And, just in that particular case: I'm veery okay if that would be a cloud service.
I believe I am entirely in compliance with YouTube's terms and policies, but I was flagged for some bullshit as well and got the boilerplate responses. So what I decided to do was hide it for logged out users so it looked like that specific feature was entirely removed to the dudes in India that review this stuff... One year later and my fingers are crossed we don't get another audit.
I am particularly disappointed by the generic "Your API usage is higher than lots of other Yelp Fusion developers" statement.
My giveback service has a tiny user-base and find it hard to believe my API usage level can be higher than average.
https://try-something-new.web.app was built a couple years ago.
This isn't unreasonable, but they absolutely should provide more than 1 business day notice.
After 2 seconds of idle research, I have found that it would cost less than a dollar a day.
https://docs.developer.yelp.com/page/start-your-free-trial
On top of that, this is a continuous payment. Even if I was looking at 5-10x rate of return, I would be very hesitant as that's the rate-of-return today while the sales are forever.
I've been wondering how realistic microsubscriptions are... Say $1-2 dollars a month per user to maintain an app, perhaps limited to just power users, would support a lot of infrastructure.
In addition though, they shared the following pricing deck with me: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
Which seems to indicate a base price of $229 per month. I have no idea why that doesn't line up with the pricing on their website. But the fact that they shared it with me indicated to me that my use case fell under some kind of "enterprise" usage. Regardless, I would not continue to work with them after 4-days notice and the threatening email. It's too small and app for it to be worth it to me.
I did ask in one of my emails about the pricing discrepancy and got no reply.
I too used the macos App.
Looking forward to Apple Map dumping Yelp, because that combo doesn't work for me and I do not want Yelp cluttering my Apple map.
Apple has added rating systems for destinations. Amenities available at location (ie, “accepts Apple Pay”, dog/cat friendly). Maybe in the next decade Yelp integration will be phased out completely
If I look at my closest city in the UK at restaurants, nothing has been reviewed recently (2018, 2019) and it's mostly from US visitors coming here.
Then there is ongoing issues between merchants and yelp [3]
Yelp used to be a great place to find some decent place to eat in a new city. But the platform has gotten stale. Reviews are less reliable. Star rating often not useful.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-il...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/06/google-takes-on-yelp-elite...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp
Google search has the same issue.
This looks like a Face/Off situation to me.
(Spoiler alert for a 1997 action movie: in Face/Off a cop surgically exchanges faces with an imprisoned villain in order to go undercover in their organization, but the villain then murders everyone who knew about the swap and steals the cop's life.)
Somebody at Yelp in 2014 knew that you had been approved to build this app. That person almost certainly no longer worked at Yelp ten years later, so the institutional knowledge of that agreement had likely been lost.
Regardless, even if it had been active for 10 months not 10 years, 4-days notice is unacceptable.
Ideally they'd have a notes field against developer apps and a robust process for recording this kind of thing - but I've worked for companies, so it doesn't surprise me at all that there's no good mechanism in place for that.
In real life, sometimes months isn't enough. On August 5, UPS will complete their API transition to OAuth based authorization after many months of process. Many of my customers haven't responded to my attempts to warn them about the change. I've resigned myself at this point to August 5 being a crazy day.
Four weeks is the statutory minimum annual leave entitlement here in New Zealand. Most people I know get more.
Don't sweat the refunds too much (unless someone is being really rude about it). Apple certainly won't.
Btw, I'm pretty sure what happened was that this conversion was planned and carried out, but nobody was assigned the responsibility to tell developers. It was clearly done last minute using the most convenient form.
Right, the biggest thing is a failure of communication. There should have been emails months ago, not 4-days (1 business day Friday->Monday) before.
If you had an actual contract, it would be a different story. Your product would still be not more than some UI to some walled garden, and nothing particularly valuable, but at least you would be officially permitted to do so.
So you basically sold something to Apple users that you don't actually own, and that is completely out of your control, and that was always in danger to just stop working suddenly.
And, on the other hand, I'm sure you've implemented a (for a hobby) decent app, and maybe you actually brought a handful of new visitors to them (which wouldn't have just used their website if your app wouldn't exist). But do you really think that at Yelp they are sitting there and just think how they can return the favor?
They basically think "well, that funny dude has now played enough". You never were a partner for them. Just what people call " useful idi*t" (sorry, but that's just the term ^^) at best. They haven't talked about you at their christmas party!
It goes both ways.
Btw, he had a contract.
> Btw, he had a contract.
Then fine, go to the court with it, end of story.
/s
Heck, in many companies I have encountered that they don't even know who is using API keys they've issued to third parties, especially over generations of systems. I am impressed that after getting email approval for an app a decade ago, Yelp still had contact details enough to let the O/P know!
None of that negates the issue of 4-days notice and Yelp shooting themselves in the foot by removing access to an app which redirects people to their website. But someone in executive management made a decision on the basis that they wanted revenue from the API overhead, wanted a slice of other people's pie and that's that.
To the O/Ps point about subscription, there was a UK food app which gave you restaurant food safety scores taken from the food safety agency "Scores on The Doors" it's gone now but I paid a few £ a year for it and never had an issue. If the Yelp pricing is sustainable at that level it's not a bad idea to pay for API access, Yelp has to pay for their servers and a portion of the API calls won't be converted to traffic. Who knows if Yelp still has a sustainable business? Maybe that API thing doesn't pay for itself? I don't know.
Which underlines what I concluded long ago: the best and most durable form of identity on the internet is rooted in the ability to pay money. Any identity that is free to create is doomed.
My first thoughts while reading the story was that their champion at Yelp quit and whoever's left didn't know/care enough about them. 10 years ago, Yelp would still be scrappy start up and there was a motivated employees willing to go outside the painted lines. Now, it's just a faceless person following orders.
Yelp was founded 20 years ago :-)
That was quite the assumption. They gave you access to something for free, not encouragement. I do feel bad for OP, but they weren't paying for the API, and should not have had any assumption that it would last forever because there was no contract or terms or anything. This is the risk we take by building our house on someone else's foundation.
I agree with you there was no expectation of it being free forever. I never said there was. What was unreasonable was the 4-days notice that it was coming to an end. That's just not enough time.
It sounds like the monetary stakes are pretty small, but depending on the author's desire, it might be worth doing some research and potentially going to small claims court and claiming damages for those customers that requested refunds.
Yes, the monetary stakes are too small for it to be worth it for me to pursue. I could probably dig up some old emails from 10+ years ago but it just wouldn't be worth it. Exposing this kind of bad behavior (4-days notice!) is enough.
What contract? He never entered into a contract or even exchanged consideration with Yelp for the API as far as I can tell.
Getting a green light via e-mail to use a free service is not a binding contract and does not come with any obligations.
He was using a free API that anyone could sign up for.
They did not exchange anything with him. Developing an app to use someone's free API is not an exchange of consideration.
I would never pursue anything further over this app that had about $2,000 of revenue over 10 years. That said, for the record there was consideration.
I had to go through an official approval process that required providing evidence of the app's functionality and a few emails back and forth. I think I actually sent them a prototype of it. And based on that process they decided how many daily API calls to give me. A normal free user did not receive 25,000 API calls per day. I believe if you didn't go through approval back then you got something like 1,000 per month. So there was a consideration process on their part and a determination to green light my use case.
You could argue that the indefinite API access was in exchange for writing the app (service for service), but if this were me, I probably wouldn't bother. Maybe I'd write an adversarial-interoperability backend to replace the API, or open-source the app to allow other interested parties to do so. Or maybe I'd just say "It was a nice run", and let it die.
If you care enough to send a polite email, you could say that Yelp has a prior agreement, you'd appreciate them not reneging, and if they do, you'd appreciate compensation for your labour (minus, of course, the money you made from the software). Probably won't go anywhere, but…
But at that point it’s not a question of cost, it’s a question of how much of your time and headache you want to spend. So yeah, probably not worth it
granting API access in excess of the free tier would most likely constitute something of value, but yeah - probably wouldn't bother, it would be expensive to pursue and not worth it.
> To my mind the acquiring and delivering of the [used chocolate bar] wrappers was certainly part of the consideration in these cases, and I see no good reason for drawing a distinction between these and other cases. — Lord Reid
> It is said that when received the wrappers are of no value to Nestlé’s. This I would have thought irrelevant. A contracting party can stipulate for what consideration he chooses. A peppercorn does not cease to be good consideration if it is established that the promisee does not like pepper and will throw away the corn. — Lord Somervell of Harrow
https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1959/1.html
Real lesson here is to avoid single points of failure, regardless if it's API, people or partners. Ask yourself a question if there's a single entity that can kill your business and remove that reliance.
Google used to need Search in order to learn about the intimate details of our lives. It's how they knew what we were interested in, what our medical problems were, what we were learning, and what we were thinking about.
Now they have chrome giving google people's entire browsing history, android devices collecting realtime data on what people are doing offline, where they are and who they are with. Google also has products like fitbit, nest, and gmail that gather still more data for google. Google doesn't need Search to spy on us anymore, so they haven't invested in keeping it useful.
In fact, it's better for google if you can't find what you want and have to make multiple searches for information because it gives them more chances to throw ads at you, and the harder it is for people to find websites using Search the more sites might feel like they have no choice but to pay Google to keep them at the top of the search results.
People who find Search increasingly useless though are turning to alternatives and for many people AI could end up replacing google's Search product as the first thing they turn to.
I would not count on Search staying around forever.
This keeps people developing content to please Google and running ads on Google platforms to get more traffic.
The quality of Google search lately has felt pretty meh, especially for generic topics that get hits for crummy blogspam. Google’s own AI results at the top are pretty much the thing keeping me there atm aside from inertia. My personal browser is on DDG which is fine just a tad slow comparatively
(https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/10/27/google-paid-26-billion-i...)
Most products have an expected expiration date and you can provide a useful service (that generates revenue) by building on other platforms, even if it won't last forever.
By now I missed more opportunities by having the mindset of "not relying on other people's APIs" than real changes/shutdowns would warrant this kind of caution.
There was so much hype & excitement in web2 age, about APIs & intertwingularity. Humanity was going to keep improving & iterating & crafting ever neater ideas.
Now it's all bureaucracy & lawyers arrayed to defend the cloud-keeps, moats & walls.
The user & agency of the world has been steady dimished, eroded away by ever advancing legal IP Protectionism.
The reason why those free tiers went away is that AI came along. Not so much that the AI scrapers were abusing Yelp free tier[0], but that they could. And once companies realized how much money was floating around in selling data access, non-abusive free tier users went from "a cool goodwill gesture" to "freeloading parasites".
David Kopec and Restauraunts got steamrolled in a case of technological gentrification. If you're selling data access for $TOO_CHEAP_TO_METER/call to a random indie, Apple, Google, and/or Microsoft will use that as a comparable for why Yelp should charge peanuts. Or they'll just acquihire him. They need him and his app to go away because he is inconvenient to the long-term valuation plan of Yelp, an old guard Web 2.0 business that never quite became sovereign.
[0] Though, to be clear, AI scrapers are absolutely abusive in general.
He did get through to the sales rep. The responses are directly in the article. The sales rep responded within hours and showed him how to sign up for the free trial option to extend the free usage period longer while he decided.
What more would you want the rep to do?
> What more would you want the rep to do?
Not send a threatening, inaccurate email with a 4-day (1 business day Friday->Monday) deadline in the first place?
Also for the record, this was not a sales manager. This was someone in "growth" that sent the email. I guess maybe that just means "sales."
You're right it wasn't just inaccurate it was outright deceptive, trying to frame this as something specific to OP that he is responsible for rather than a change in their business applying to all API users.
Employ a shred of critical thinking and realize this app probably drives more value to Yelp than the cost to run the API, and flag it for an exception.
And yes, many companies have "customer service" like that designed to waste your time until you go away. That doesn't mean it's the only possible way.
This is a strategy, like quiet firing, to make people go away.
Rather than being up front, this is an underhanded way of making folks leave.
I'd like to see how someone can see a directly employed Google support agent / repair technician in person for support like you can with the Genius Bar.
Additionally, as far as I know, the kind of support you get calling AppleCare is unmatched by anyone else.
The thing is, regardless of the turnover or situation, 4-days (actually 1-business day Friday->Monday) is not a reasonable timeframe to threaten to shutoff someone's API key who hasn't violated any terms of service. They have the right to do it, but it doesn't make you want to work with them in the future.
userShouldPay(apiKey) always evaluates to True.
Yes, Yelp was a bit clumsy in handling this, but discontinuing the free API after 10 years is totally within their rights. The developer didn't even bother getting their pricing proposal, which might have been totally reasonable (or not), considering his app is paid.
Well they can do whatever timeframe they want of course. And I can write about how rude it is. 4-days (really 1-business day in the original email Friday->Monday) is not a reasonable timeframe within which to threaten to cutoff an app with real users.
Dear Yelp,
Your decision to discontinue the free API was unexpected, and it’s difficult for me to switch to the new one within the given very short 4-day timeframe. Not only is this not enough time to estimate how your new API pricing will affect my business model, but it also requires some engineering work to switch my app to the new API.
Given my 10-year history of working with Yelp, I would appreciate it if you could send me your new pricing proposal ASAP and also give me some time to consider it. If accepted, I would need additional time to implement it.
Thank you.
Also, the money is very very low stakes. This app sells dozens of copies a year. Not hundreds or thousands. It's just not worth it financially. It sold 467 copies over 10 years. People who used it loved it, but it's not a money maker.
If you don't want to deal with the slightest inconvenience don't run a business and don't take money from customers. You owe it to your users to care at least a bit.
I did care "at least a bit" which is why I kept updating the app for 10-years despite it not making almost any money. How many indie apps survive that long? But based on the pricing they quoted me it would be a money-losing venture to continue (see slide 3 base monthly fee $229 from the deck they sent me): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
And we have to decide what we work on when we are just one person. If it's money-losing and they don't treat you well it might not make sense to keep doing it.
That said, as I expressed in the blog post I do feel really bad for any of the users that bought the app and I want all of them to get a refund from Apple as explained in the post. They can use these directions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/118223
Christ on a bike, he is giving people refund and you act like he does not care at all.
Unfortunately, if you're not a paying customer with a contract they can discontinue free service whenever they want.
Frustrating? Absolutely.
No matter the rate Yelp set, the apps economics no longer make sense. The existing customers, already paid, and he has no way to transition them to a subscription.
Used to be that, coupled with competition with competing services, was the main reason sites offered APIs.
According to the article, Yelp promised him 25,000 API calls per day:
> In fact, without me specifically asking for it, they provided a 25,000 per day API call limit
If the app has outlived its lifecycle, the end of the free API might be a signal to retire it. Blaming Yelp and making a drama out of it seems a bit much. Suppose they had given him 30 days instead of 4; would his decision really be any different?
Possibly not, but the point of OP's complaint is that Yelp was rude, handled it poorly, and gave him an unreasonably short deadline. No one is arguing that Yelp doesn't have the right to discontinue free API access, or that OP's business model was a good and sustainable one.
But agreed: if OP could have gotten a rate that would have cost, say, 10 cents per day (or even more, like 50 cents or a dollar a day), maybe that would have been ok. And maybe he could have changed the pricing on the app for future purchasers to a subscription model, some small token amount like $1/mo or even $5/year.
But also consider it's pretty crappy to give someone such a short amount of time to make the decision as to whether or not that new business model would work, and if it's worth it to put more development effort into the app to enable that new pricing scheme.
Don't read it if you don't like it. Some of us actually give a fuck how badly companies are treating people, even if you don't.
The only interesting part of the story is to what extent others actually learn sth from it (that lesson should be trivial, but nowadays it obviously is all but common sense). And I guess: Not very much. They will 'give a fuck' here how bad the world and all is, and then continue in their naive way tomorrow.
Except, elsewhere in this thread:
> the prices they quoted were ridiculously high (thousands of dollars a month).
https://docs.developer.yelp.com/page/start-your-free-trial
The email also arrived in my spam folder, so I was lucky to even see it. Once I got back to them they did increase the cutoff by a few days but it has since been stopped.
Their new prices seemed insane to me.
I call this the "going out of business sale".
https://steveshuconsulting.com/2006/03/the_pricing_dea/
Some background is required first. Travelocity was the first online travel agency (OTA). I believe they started around 1996.
Through most of its life at that point all, I mean 95%+, of its success came from only two factors: best marketing in industry and growth of the internet. This is severely problematic because marketing only gets you so far in business. Conversely Expedia had really shitty marketing in comparison and yet came to dominate the industry because they were extremely aggressive at growing their supplier relations.
You cannot EVER rely on growth of media adoption, like mom and pop coming online, because once that stops you have no fuel left in the tank. Reliance on growth of a media platform is like a gravy train that you did nothing to build and returns amazing wealth if you are in the right place at the right time, but once it stagnates its like your train derails and everybody dies. That is because everybody expects growth to continue, except you did nothing to earn the growth and now have no answers and nothing to show for it. This was around later 2008 when I joined the company and became unavoidably obvious to everybody over the next year.
So, at that point what do you do? You competitors are far out pacing you by ignoring fun stuff, marketing, technology, and all the other bullshit that technology people look to. Instead they are focusing on core business principles and eating your golden goose while laughing at you. So, what do you do?
In the case of Travelocity all the executives leave. New executives come into trying to figure out what to do. Like every great web business they focus more aggressively on marketing and advertising. This was Travelocity's death spiral.
You have to understand that people DO NOT like advertisements. Really, I know its surprising, but when your site becomes littered with advertisements everywhere and all kinds of hidden telemetry people will leave and never come back. Your wonderful palace has become a trailer park.
The business loves advertising. Revenue from advertisements is immediate. That is really significant. In e-commerce there is a massive lag between each stage of profit, revenue, and sales because you have to account for the cost of operations, sales, and inventory. The more expensive the product the longer the lag and that lag really complicates projections. So advertisements are like cocaine, because they immediately return profit that requires no effort while rotting your health slowly until you are a hollow skeleton.
To be fair they were doing amazing things with inventory and pricing that was vastly superior to what the competition was doing after the leadership turn over. This was too little too late though. These innovations could have saved the business provided more time and the same level of discipline, but not when you are already in a death spiral.
My learning from this is that a business that earns profit from selling something directly should not fuck up conversion or go out of its way to make customers hate them. When I put that way it sounds obvious, but web business get that wrong all the time because they get distracted by shiny things.
I am curious what these amazing things were.
The real interest in the travel agency business is on hotel inventory. This is how Expedia came to dominate the industry, because they aggressively hired geographically focused hotel relationship personnel and Travelocity wasn't keeping up. So Expedia had much greater inventory from various different properties and stronger relationships with those properties for their business prioritization. Hotels, typically hate dealing with OTAs, because OTAs are a transparent barrier between the hotel and the guest staying at the hotel, but the OTAs bring people to the properties. The name of the game for hotels is "heads in beds" and while up-selling is beneficial if you get the "heads in beds" part wrong you cannot exist.
The margin on hotel properties is much higher and highly variable. Hotels in many cases will even eat the cost of airfare to get heads in beds if the pricing is right. That provides a huge opportunity for a marriage between smart hotel systems and OTAs because the hotels are doing the smarter inventory management and the OTAs are supplying the airfare volume and customers to populate that smart inventory management. The hotel data systems, Property Management Systems (PMS), were at that time much smarter than the inventory availability OTAs had, because they had to do much more to account for seasonal volume planning and various customer demands.
Where Travelocity was strong was in writing algorithms to account for these considerations and offer volume pricing discounts the competition could not and also air + hotel package pricing at massive discounts the competition could not compete with. In parallel Travelocity was slowly building up a corporate travel business to take advantage of that volume pricing intelligence and at one point had both WalMart and Lockheed-Martin as customers.
Again, both of those were amazing and could have really helped retake lost market, but conquering competition is a fragile slow process while advertising is immediate.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/YELP/yelp/net-inco...
Been going sideways for a decade now though:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/YELP/yelp/market-c...
Next you’ll tell me that they’re NOT actually experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes!
I'm curious to what they compare this. The non-existent free plan where everything higher than 0 is unusual. Or a large mass of dead accounts who have really zero to none usage. Or the actually paying account who are now on their enterprise plan. In the later case, this might indicate some real problem if their usage is low enough that smaller projects are already exceptional.
They never answered my question about the discrepancy between these prices and the prices on their website. Both would be too high to make Restaurants low sales sustainable.
That said, I'll say again that they were perfectly in their right to start charging for their API. They just should not have done so with 4-days notice and with such a threatening email.
I mean, don't take this as me defending Yelp - they're scumbags, and deserve any hate coming their way - but I don't think that the headline is an accurate description of what happened.