[HN Gopher] After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
___________________________________________________________________
After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
Author : WoodenChair
Score : 295 points
Date : 2024-07-29 23:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.observationalhazard.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.observationalhazard.com)
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Well the thing is they gave me 25000 per day, but the actual
| use was less than 100. The 25000 number is almost a red herring
| to the rest of the story.
|
| It's understandable they went to paid. What's not
| understandable is the 4 days notice and tone of the email.
| justinclift wrote:
| 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?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I would be surprised if it were much more than a database
| lookup.
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah, it's probably that simple. 25k calls may only be a
| few seconds worth of actual database runtime too, if
| that.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| API rate-limits have always been a cash grab and a way to
| discourage efficient automated use in favor of getting a
| human to "engage" instead.
| azmarks wrote:
| 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).
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. What was your product?
| azmarks wrote:
| 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
| algo_trader wrote:
| > 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)
|
| thanks
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| > near infinite free api calls
|
| 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.)
| m463 wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| 20after4 wrote:
| 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.
| m463 wrote:
| lol, I was talking about yelp. I'm pretty sure when they made
| the API, it was actually laying out the rug. Let everyone
| build on top of it.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| 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.
| altairprime wrote:
| 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.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I think nobody wants an API. The same reason why YouTube plays
| cat-and-mouse with yt-dl and longs for the sweet nectar of
| Widevine DRM
|
| To wit, there is exactly one business strategy: When you are
| small, be nice. When you are big, pull that ladder up behind
| you.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| alexose wrote:
| 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.
| omegaworks wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
| ronsor wrote:
| Why would anyone ever want to train an AI off Yelp reviews?
| That sounds horrifying.
| gaogao wrote:
| Local recommendations is a big category of LLM questions that
| they're mostly bad at today that they can sell ads for in the
| future.
| jcrash wrote:
| Yelp sucks. I wish Apple Maps would drop it like a hot potato.
| s1gsegv wrote:
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| 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
| stemlord wrote:
| Their website should be a primary case study for normalizing ux
| dark patterns
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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..)
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| Apple Maps Yelp integration is irritating. Any click on a photo
| prompts Yelp install. I wish they had a "Don't Show Me Again"
| option
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| If the api was as basic as you say, can you replace it with some
| screen scraping on yelp's site?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Probably not without violating other terms of service.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| I don't care about Yelp's terms of service, do you?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You will when a process server hands you a notice.
| stavros wrote:
| A notice of what? It's not illegal to violate someone's
| random wishlist. It's not like you've signed a contract
| with them.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| So have the bot act on behalf of the user, using workers
| run on the user's machine. That's fair use.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Are you in the habit of releasing software that causes
| users to violate the ToS of services?
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| https://njal.la/ looks interesting.
| jandrese wrote:
| Corporate policy is not the law. If you didn't sign a
| contract with them they should have no legal power. The
| DMCA was a mistake.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| leros wrote:
| It should be ok as long as you do it logged out.
|
| 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
| notpushkin wrote:
| > I assume they've vetted all the legality of things.
|
| 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)
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 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.
| cirrus3 wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Not only would that violate their terms of service, but the
| monetary stakes are also too low for it to be worth it to me
| even if it didn't.
| egamirorrim wrote:
| Real scumbag move from Yelp, sorry to read this man
| calmbonsai wrote:
| 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.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Yelp is a scumbag company, I'm surprised it's still in business
| as it's reviled by business owners and TripAdvisor crushes it
| in its segment.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Therefore, doing the easy thing is wrong.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Usually. If you are doing the easy thing, so can your
| competitors. Your competition usually can't do the hard
| things.
| munchler wrote:
| "Opaque codeball" is a very large category. Are you saying you
| won't use any 3rd-party libraries at all?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Almost none, but "at all" is also a very large category.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| leros wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Their loss of additional content, traffic and ad revenue.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The impact on google losing $10m of revenue is exactly equal
| to the impact of John Doe losing $10m of revenue
|
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _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?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Google made $300B last year.
|
| 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.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| 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?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| logicchains wrote:
| >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).
| dambi0 wrote:
| Might there be other reasons to report lower profits?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 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.
| damiante wrote:
| 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.
| akudha wrote:
| 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
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| open source your code ?
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| Couldn't you have bypassed them and used `yt-dlp` or something
| similar?
|
| Why get Google/YouTube's permission at all about this?
| leros wrote:
| I was creating YouTube channels and uploading videos to them
| on behalf of my users. That requires using the YouTube API.
| dudus wrote:
| Can you let the user bring their own API key?
| indrora wrote:
| reread: The project was going in the other direction, From a
| pure audio source to a Youtube video.
| billylo wrote:
| I am in the same boat, sadly.
|
| 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.
| RIMR wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Absolutely. You wrote it better than I did myself in the
| original post.
| woah wrote:
| Surprised the guy never even inquired as to how much the API
| access to support 100 API calls per day would cost.
|
| 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
| franciscop wrote:
| 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.
| stevarino wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| It's just not worth working with a partner that will shut you
| off at 4-days notice.
|
| 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.
| egberts1 wrote:
| I think Yelp marketing is on an incredible shortsighted and
| profit-losing path.
|
| 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.
| xyst wrote:
| 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
| xyst wrote:
| 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.
|
| [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
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Yelp suffers from the classic issue of not having a way to
| monetize that isn't a conflict of interest with their core
| business model.
|
| Google search has the same issue.
| simonw wrote:
| > 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| That's fair, but you'd think their admin interface would show
| how long an app had been active for and any notes about the app
| from the beginning.
|
| Regardless, even if it had been active for 10 months not 10
| years, 4-days notice is unacceptable.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| radley wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > 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.
| eddieroger wrote:
| > 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| openasocket wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Depending on what kind of approvals they gave him 10 years
| ago, it MIGHT be possible that doing this violates a contract.
|
| 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.
| openasocket wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but "if you develop a native Mac application for Yelp,
| we'll give you free API access" sounds a lot like
| consideration.
|
| 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.
| drra wrote:
| 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.
| danjl wrote:
| Surely nothing like this will happen to the folks that are using
| LLMs at the core of their app. /s
| physhster wrote:
| 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...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
|
| What more would you want the rep to do?
| umvi wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| umvi wrote:
| Indeed, 4 days does seem too aggressive. You are probably a
| victim of automation: for (apiKey in
| apiKeys) if (userShouldPay(apiKey))
| sendCanned4DayWarningEmail(apiKey);
| vzaliva wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| vzaliva wrote:
| 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.
|
| Thank you.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > 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/fil
| e/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
| mvdtnz wrote:
| The yelp guy even preemptively offered a solution, telling
| him to sign up for a free trial if he needed some extra
| time.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Give them your credit card? No he did the right thing.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > they just can't give us 4-days notice.
|
| Unfortunately, if you're not a paying customer with a
| contract they can discontinue free service whenever they
| want.
|
| Frustrating? Absolutely.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Right I don't mean legally. I mean in terms of making
| people want to continue to work with them.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| greycol wrote:
| He hasn't promised not to scrape their site using even more
| of their resources...
|
| Used to be that, coupled with competition with competing
| services, was the main reason sites offered APIs.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > Yelp promised nothing
|
| 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
| vzaliva wrote:
| 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?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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.
| catapart wrote:
| > Blaming Yelp and making a drama out of it seems a bit
| much.
|
| 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.
| oniony wrote:
| Have you considered building your own restaurant database? You
| could add features to the app to allow users to submit and update
| entries.
| purec wrote:
| 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.
|
| Their new prices seemed insane to me.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's a very fair point.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Yahoo used to have a decent restaurants API. I assume that's dead
| now.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| If I knew about this app before, I would've definitely bought it!
| The Yelp site and app are incredibly slow and tedious to use
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Thank you. Yup that was the main thing people liked about it.
| It was really fast and had no ads.
| iamleppert wrote:
| When will people realize that using any big tech company API is a
| recipe for disaster? These companies, and their revolving door of
| employees, could care less about you, your app, or your users.
| sadcodemonkey wrote:
| For a site that caters to a startup and entrepreneurial crowd,
| it's hilarious the number of comments here that amount to "tough
| cookies, bud" and "Yelp can do whatever they want, and because
| they can, you should just shut up."
|
| They miss the spirit of this blog post entirely, which is to
| point out the overt hostility to and powerlessness of API users.
| That should be concerning to anyone working on projects that use
| APIs, which is, um... almost everyone, these days.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Thanks--yeah I actually think they mostly just didn't read the
| whole post since I addressed this in detail in the last two
| bold sections "Development Ends" and "Lessons Learned."
| Veuxdo wrote:
| > That should be concerning to anyone working on projects that
| use APIs
|
| Well, free APIs anyway. If you are paying for API access, you
| hopefully have a contract which gives you power.
| dual_dingo wrote:
| Even if you pay, most likely you have a contract that
| effectively gives you close to no power because it's full of
| conditions favoring the service provider and trying to use
| the little power you have will be expensive because laywers
| and courts get involved.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > which is to point out the overt hostility to and
| powerlessness of API users. That should be concerning to anyone
| working on projects that use APIs, which is, um... almost
| everyone, these days.
|
| Not everyone. Business that build on top of other company's
| APIs will arrange contracts with their API providers. Those
| contracts generally include warning periods for changes or
| discontinuation and penalties for early termination.
|
| The key here is that it was a _free_ API with no contract or
| guarantees. Four days is short notice and frustrating, but it
| wouldn 't have really changed the trajectory of his business if
| they had given him 180 days. If he didn't intend to pay for the
| API, he couldn't really sell an app that was going to stop
| working in a few months.
|
| So I know we're supposed to be angry about the 4 days thing.
| It's not good, obviously. However, I don't think it actually
| changes the situation at all if he wasn't going to sign up
| anyway.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > So I know we're supposed to be angry about the 4 days
| thing. It's not good, obviously. However, I don't think it
| actually changes the situation at all if he wasn't going to
| sign up anyway.
|
| As I said in the post and comments here if it made financial
| sense I would be willing to pay for the API. In this case it
| didn't make financial sense, so you're right at the current
| API prices it wouldn't make sense even with 6 months-notice.
|
| That said, 6-months (your suggested time period) is a much
| better grace period for our shared users (users of
| Restaurants who use it as a frontend and continue to read
| more reviews at Yelp.com) and much more likely to make me
| convert to a paid API customer if it had made financial
| sense.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > and much more likely to make me convert to a paid API
| customer if it had made financial sense
|
| I don't understand. Are you saying that even if it did make
| financial sense, you would have voluntarily shut the app
| down in protest of the 4-day notice period? Even though the
| sales rep pointed you toward the free trial option to
| continue using the API beyond the 4 days while you decided?
|
| I know you're angry and want us all to be angry at Yelp
| too, but I have a difficult time believing that anyone
| would choose to destroy a profitable application out of
| protest just to stick it to the company about a short
| notice period.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I hear you, but this story keeps happening over and over and
| over. The reality is once these companies have you and your
| product by the balls, they will start squeezing. You can pay
| money to reduce the pressure, or leave and not be squeezed. I
| would argue using an unpaid API takes you into the unknown with
| considerable risk.
| lmm wrote:
| > They miss the spirit of this blog post entirely, which is to
| point out the overt hostility to and powerlessness of API
| users. That should be concerning to anyone working on projects
| that use APIs, which is, um... almost everyone, these days.
|
| This has been known for like 20 years now. We all know that if
| you're relying on someone else's API that's a massive risk to
| your business. What more is there to say at this point? What
| sympathy is there to give when the inevitable happens?
| kelnos wrote:
| > _if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you
| are at their whim_
|
| More than that, if you aren't paying for use of that third-party
| API, the people who run it will not care about you, and will
| think nothing of shutting you down.
|
| I think Yelp handled this poorly, and Restaurants was probably a
| net positive for their business -- a positive that they were
| getting for near-zero cost. It's a shame that companies are so
| short-sighted like this.
|
| But ultimately if you build on top of someone else's platform,
| with no backups and no alternatives, it's not really truly your
| app.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Control your own future, or you'll have no future.
| jdenning wrote:
| This really sucks for OP, but my first thought on seeing yelp
| was:
|
| "People still use yelp? I thought it was widely known that they
| suppress bad reviews for money, and suppress good reviews if you
| don't pay."
|
| Yelp's path to monetization has always been kind of scummy IMO.
| grishka wrote:
| That's when you take matters into your own hands and extract the
| API key out of one of their official apps. At least that's what I
| would've done.
|
| Though I'm not sure how legal that would've been if done in a
| _paid_ app. It feels like a serious difference between just
| providing a better UX for someone else 's service through
| adversarial interoperability for free, and profiting off of it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-31 23:00 UTC)