[HN Gopher] After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
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After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
Author : WoodenChair
Score : 812 points
Date : 2024-07-29 23:09 UTC (2 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
| pino82 wrote:
| If the price is too high for you, here is my idea for you:
| don't use their product. ;)
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| uniclaude wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| ycombobreaker wrote:
| > 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!
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Isn't that kind of what they do with QE?
| ycombobreaker wrote:
| 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.
| 38 wrote:
| 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.
| da_chicken wrote:
| It's just more of Cory Doctrow's observation of
| Enshittification.
|
| Or, perhaps more simply, The Oatmeal's Reaching People on the
| Internet: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
| 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.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Reminds me of this video about the old, open web:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
| pino82 wrote:
| I was just wondering why - for multiple screens of text -
| nobody came and just posted some pointless youtube link.
|
| But this case seems to be funny at least (acc to your
| text): A YT link about the 'old, open web'. YMMD!
| 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.
| netcan wrote:
| 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.
| 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
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| They don't care what you wish for, you're the product.
| 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?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yelp can afford lawyers who will try to convince a judge
| otherwise. Can you afford lawyers to argue your case?
| 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:
| Have you seen the results of the hiQ Labs v LinkedIn
| case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
| dankwizard wrote:
| It's so cute watching people play pretend lawyer on the
| internet.
| 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)
| TheDong wrote:
| It's not quite so clear-cut. We even have a historical
| precedent here:
|
| 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.
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Not necessarily. p=>q does not mean q=>p, after all.
| stavros wrote:
| It does when !p=>!q.
| yazmeya wrote:
| !p=>!q is exactly q=>p, and p=>q has nothing to do with
| that.
| stavros wrote:
| I feel like you should read the original comment again.
| 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.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| No, it's not contextual. "Company X made $N billion
| dollars" only means one thing, net income.
| nick7376182 wrote:
| Sorry bro it's contextual.
| WesBrownSQL wrote:
| 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| That's like saying a trading company made a trillion
| dollars because you counted all of the securities sales
| but not the costs.
| eropple wrote:
| 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.
| grugagag wrote:
| By that logic I make what I can save, lol
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| right, which if you follow that assumption you can see
| that things are not as great as you thought.
| grugagag wrote:
| 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...
| ta1243 wrote:
| Well yes.
|
| Companies get to write off expenses of existing
|
| People don't
| kortilla wrote:
| Mortgage accumulates equity. Bad example
| ta1243 wrote:
| Mortgage interest payments don't
|
| Your assets might inflate in value, but that's nothing to
| do with the mortgage
| g15jv2dp wrote:
| Even if we subscribe to this interpretation, the overall
| point stands.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Revenue isn't profit, but your wasted business
| expenditures are properly measured against your revenue.
| That's what they're spent from.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| Literally none of that is relevant for much the corporate
| entity made (I.e. what the shareholders got).
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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)
| nemothekid wrote:
| This is a bizarre nitpick.
|
| 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?
| 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?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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.
| authorfly wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| laserlight wrote:
| In addition, a low profit margin may increase lifetime
| profits by deterring potential competitors.
| kortilla wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 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.
| oblio wrote:
| > 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.
|
| From other MegaCorps.
| 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
| ElFitz wrote:
| > [...] much less be willing to take on giant tech
| corporations [...]
|
| I'd argue that, on the contrary, it seems to be all the
| rage lately.
| akudha wrote:
| Not really. There is a big difference between making
| noise and actually _doing_ something about the power of
| big tech.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _The impact on google losing $10m of revenue is exactly
| equal to the impact of John Doe losing $10m of revenue_
|
| no, it's not, see declining marginal utility of wealth
|
| https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishi
| n...
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutilit
| y...
| SenHeng wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| asveikau wrote:
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| I've heard that serving them process is another way to talk
| to a human being.
| oblio wrote:
| It's the same with Google.
| zerkten wrote:
| 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.
| kaibee wrote:
| 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.
|
| Excellent customer experience.
| 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?
| leros wrote:
| 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.
| PokestarFan wrote:
| I once tried using a Python library to upload videos with
| an API key. All videos uploaded got forced private due to
| "spam".
| leros wrote:
| 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.
| indrora wrote:
| reread: The project was going in the other direction, From a
| pure audio source to a Youtube video.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Cool idea, I was almost about to do the same app/service. I
| didn't know it could end like that. (Naive, I know.)
| leros wrote:
| Have you seen https://repurpose.io? They existed before I
| started working on my service and they do the same thing.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| chillfox wrote:
| I used to not bother with APIs and instead use selenium to
| drive the websites. It neatly avoided all of the politics
| around API access.
| bitwize wrote:
| That may be a CFAA violation, a felony in the United States.
| See _Ryanair DAC v. Booking Holdings, Inc._
| traviswingo wrote:
| This literally made me lol. Not sure if it's true. I might
| be true. But come on!
| leros wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| When it comes to CFAA violations, corporations get a $5K
| fine, while individuals get hounded to suicide.
| jascination wrote:
| Start a company then do my nefarious work under that, got
| it!
| bdangubic wrote:
| You should do ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING in your life under a
| company. And I mean EVERYTHING
| wombatpm wrote:
| 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.
| smallnamespace wrote:
| Have you considered short paying him again through the
| same entity? After all, that's one use case of limited
| liability ;)
| lelandfe wrote:
| Kafka is smiling appreciatively at your approach to
| marriage
| exe34 wrote:
| corporations are more people than people.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Unironically, yes.
| oblio wrote:
| 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?
| jamil7 wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > 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.
| djbusby wrote:
| Very Probably No way they could find me.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Just say you train an AI on it and it's all fair game.
| CalRobert wrote:
| HTTP is an API of sorts...
| selcuka wrote:
| > HTTP is an API of sorts...
|
| True, but it is an API that they can't easily deprecate on
| a whim.
| reddalo wrote:
| But they can quickly change the "structure" of that API.
| vladstudio wrote:
| I believe this is where smarter tools like Kadoa [0] can
| be of help. It detects data structure changes for
| existing workflows, and adapts to them.
|
| [0] https://www.kadoa.com/
| account42 wrote:
| A small problem compared to not having an API key and
| being stonewalled as to why.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| 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".
| xeromal wrote:
| Isn't that similar to deleting your API key except you
| can at least fix the structure of the selenium one.
| nvy wrote:
| >Lesson learned.
|
| And that lesson is don't base your business model around
| playing in someone else's waled garden.
| pino82 wrote:
| Precisely that.
|
| Funnily, if I understood correctly, he already had that
| lesson with Facebook. Let's see what comes next...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Are you based in EU? If yes, then I would a complaint letter to
| the competition bureau. And you can CC Google offices in your
| country.
| authorfly wrote:
| 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.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| If only we weren't living in a world run by abusive mafia...
| o_O
| herbst wrote:
| 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.
| grobbyy wrote:
| 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.
| doh wrote:
| 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
| pino82 wrote:
| My sympathy is veeery limited. But once you have an app that
| does the exact opposite, please tell me!!
|
| And, just in that particular case: I'm veery okay if that would
| be a cloud service.
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| Perhaps theere are a lot of inactive API users with zero usage
| so the statement is _technically_ true ;)
| billylo wrote:
| Textbook half truths. :-|
| 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
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| physicsguy wrote:
| It's not even popular outside of the US, I'm not sure how they
| can grow with that.
|
| 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.
| 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.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| > I get uncomfortable with 30 days
|
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I get uncomfortable with 30 days notice because I've had
| the occasional vacation that long!
|
| Four weeks is the statutory minimum annual leave
| entitlement here in New Zealand. Most people I know get
| more.
| 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.
| pino82 wrote:
| why? for what?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| SenHeng wrote:
| Usually it would've been a 2 day notice. The great
| magnanimous Yelp noticed it was a weekend and decided to give
| the author another 2 days.
|
| /s
| bobdvb wrote:
| 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 PS 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.
| starttoaster wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 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.
| pino82 wrote:
| There was no contract and nothing. Even instant revocation
| would be okay. Why not?
| shombaboor wrote:
| 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.
| SenHeng wrote:
| John Travolta and Nic Cage at their finest.
|
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| > 10 years ago, Yelp would still be scrappy start up
|
| Yelp was founded 20 years ago :-)
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Ah, that's not what consideration means in contract law.
| Consideration means something is exchanged for something
| else. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration_in
| _English_law)
|
| 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...
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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.
| openasocket wrote:
| 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
| ynx wrote:
| something of value*
|
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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 Nestle'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
| umanwizard wrote:
| I would be amazed if it's somehow possible for a company to
| implicitly commit themselves to giving you API access forever
| without a formal contract.
| openasocket wrote:
| 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.
| ynx wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| fencepost wrote:
| 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.
| jowea wrote:
| Not even search makes the cut?
| autoexec wrote:
| Search is already dying. Google doesn't need it.
| StressedDev wrote:
| Do you have a source for this? I suspect search makes at
| least 75% of Google's profits.
| autoexec wrote:
| see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
|
| 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.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Umm, they still need to sell Search ads right?
| oblio wrote:
| They do, I'm not sure what that other comment was on
| about.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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
| noahtallen wrote:
| Well, they pay $25B+ per year to be the default search
| engine on various platforms, so that seems unlikely in
| the near term.
|
| (https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/10/27/google-
| paid-26-billion-i...)
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Given how management is behaving lately, I wouldn't rule
| out any "shooting yourself in the foot" moves by them
| WA wrote:
| 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.
| siva7 wrote:
| 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.
| 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?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > 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."
| ForHackernews wrote:
| The email wasn't inaccurate: They really were going to shut
| down his API key and then they did.
| account42 wrote:
| > 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.
| xvector wrote:
| > What more would you want the rep to do?
|
| 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.
| tra3 wrote:
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| 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.
| Fomite wrote:
| One of the things I most admire and also loathe about Big Tech
| is how much they normalized nonexistent customer service.
| StressedDev wrote:
| 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.
| compootr wrote:
| github support is nil in my experiences
| LilBytes wrote:
| Par for the course for any product or service owned by
| Microsoft.
| dr-smooth wrote:
| on the other hand, gitlab support has impressed me a few
| times with the speed of the response and the knowledge
| level of the support techs.
| m463 wrote:
| Maybe if you can initiate a chargeback, you get customer
| service.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| sixothree wrote:
| 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.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| Hey now, don't lump Apple into this.
|
| 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.
| choppaface wrote:
| 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.
| volleygman180 wrote:
| And I'd put Apple App Store Review team (specifically, the
| appeals/rejection team) at the top of this list
| 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);
| joelfried wrote:
| There's yellow squiggly underneath userShouldPay(apiKey)
| that reads:
|
| userShouldPay(apiKey) always evaluates to True.
| 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
| Mashimo wrote:
| > You owe it to your users to care at least a bit.
|
| Christ on a bike, he is giving people refund and you act
| like he does not care at all.
| robertoandred wrote:
| I had the exact same experience you did, and feel the
| exact same way.
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| Those of us who do, never expected much from a company
| like yelp to start with.
| FireBeyond 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.
|
| Except, elsewhere in this thread:
|
| > the prices they quoted were ridiculously high (thousands
| of dollars a month).
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I may be reading it incorrectly, but it looks like
| $9.99/1000 API calls.
|
| https://docs.developer.yelp.com/page/start-your-free-
| trial
| 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.
| jrockway wrote:
| > Their new prices seemed insane to me.
|
| I call this the "going out of business sale".
| Mistletoe wrote:
| The death spiral.
|
| https://steveshuconsulting.com/2006/03/the_pricing_dea/
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Thank you for the link, nicely explained!
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >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.
|
| I am curious what these amazing things were.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Thank you for this comment. Very interesting! And very
| applicable to everything we are doing again.
| dartos wrote:
| Doesn't Google own yelp?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| No, it is a publicly listed company:
|
| 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...
| Pathogen-David wrote:
| Doesn't seem like they do. They attempted to acquire them
| back in 2009 but it didn't work out.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Or they want to get the traffic back directly and overprice
| on purpose.
| bpm140 wrote:
| "they also told me my usage was higher than other
| developers..."
|
| Next you'll tell me that they're NOT actually experiencing
| higher-than-normal call volumes!
| valiant55 wrote:
| "We've understaffed our call center" just doesn't have the
| same ring to it.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| The prices in the deck they shared with me are on slide 3 if
| anyone is interested:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
|
| 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.
| coryfklein wrote:
| $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...
| WoodenChair wrote:
| No, it's $10 per thousand on average (you get 1,000 calls
| per day) with a $299/month minimum commitment by my
| reading.
| 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 and they gave me a more reasonable deadline with a less
| threatening email 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > 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?
|
| An app that sold 467 copies over 10 years at less than $5
| a copy is not worth the trouble of dealing with a company
| that gives you Friday->Monday ultimatums. Obviously, if
| it were a big source of my income I would have to
| seriously consider it. But luckily, it's not. I discussed
| this in the "Development Ends" section of the post. Here
| is the pricing deck they sent me: https://drive.google.co
| m/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
|
| It seems to indicate a $229 base monthly price on the
| third slide for my use case.
|
| > 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.
|
| I'm sorry you're reading so much anger in my post. I
| thought my blog post was pretty balanced. The worst I
| called them is "quite rude" (I think it's hard to read
| their emails otherwise) and spent the first half of it
| describing my app. I never expressed much emotion in my
| post, and frankly as mentioned above it really doesn't
| matter in the scheme of things for my life. What I do
| want is Yelp to change the way it treats developers.
| Perhaps if someone there reads this it will cause a tiny
| reflection on their part. I also hope the experience here
| expressed in the "Lessons Learned" section of the post is
| useful to other indie developers.
| sadcodemonkey wrote:
| Both your neutral tone and the fact that you want Yelp
| and other big companies to treat developers better were
| very clear!
|
| That's what's crazy to me about all these comments. What
| does it say that so many developers have glossed over
| this simple ask for more considerate and respectful
| treatment for THEMSELVES? What does it say that the knee
| jerk response is fatalism to whatever big tech does?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Thank you. It's actually just a couple users who have
| posted multiple negative comments in this thread like gp.
| Not sure what nerve my blog post hit with them but they
| are free to not like it! It seems like they're more upset
| about my blog post than I am about the actual situation.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> I don't think it actually changes the situation at all if
| he wasn't going to sign up anyway.
|
| This is kind of the salient point.
|
| Either you test on the free API and plan on paying for access
| slightly before its ready to go live, or you try the "free
| lunch" approach and see if you can get one by the tendy and
| see how long you can go before you get shut down and have to
| pony up the money.
|
| Either way. they should've had the cost of the API in their
| budget.
|
| We should all know by now. . . . nobody rides for free.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > Either way. they should've had the cost of the API in
| their budget.
|
| There was no cost to the API ten years ago. I submitted a
| prototype of my app to their developer program, described
| its functionality and exchanged a few emails back and forth
| with someone in developer relations. They specifically
| approved it and decided how many API calls to give me. A
| paid API didn't exist back then to my knowledge (perhaps
| there was some kind of enterprise API but I don't know?).
| The point of the post is how badly Yelp handled the
| transition from free to paid. They are perfectly in their
| right to transition to paid. But they should've handled the
| emails and transition better.
|
| As mentioned in the post I developed the app on a whim. But
| after 10 years, it had a few users, although not many. They
| and I should have received more than a few days notice from
| Yelp that the API was going to become unsustainable (see my
| comments elsewhere in this thread).
| yreg wrote:
| True, but that developer had zero chance to get Yelp to sign
| any such contract.
|
| Just as I have zero chance of getting Apple to sign that they
| won't remove my app if they feel like it.
| 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?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Almost everyone is working on projects that "use APIs" in some
| general sense, sure. But I don't think it's the case that all
| or even most people are working on a project that entirely
| depends on a single third party's API and is useless without
| it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _They miss the spirit of this blog post entirely, which is to
| point out the overt hostility to and powerlessness of API
| users._
|
| Or, they completely get it but they work for large platforms
| that leverage API access commercially or strategically, so
| their response to unruly peasants is to figuratively chop their
| heads off.
| pvg wrote:
| _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the community._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > "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."
|
| A judge said that it wasn't extortion for yelp to hide good
| reviews until a company pays yelp, and that it wasn't extortion
| for yelp to remove bad reviews for companies that do pay them
| money though so I guess we're supposed to act like that's
| acceptable behavior and that their reviews can be considered
| trustworthy
| 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.
| gukov wrote:
| I'm actually surprised the API access lasted for so long. The
| person that provisioned it is probably long gone from Yelp.
| Similarly, the company's values and priorities have changed as
| well.
|
| Also, I'm guessing this new API pricing policy is they way of
| combating data scraping to train AI.
| ratg13 wrote:
| If you work for a company and decide that people using 100 API
| calls per day, hurts your company more than helps it.. then
| most likely you are either unqualified for making these
| decisions, or the service in question was built poorly from the
| start.
|
| There is little room to blame behavior like this on bad actors
| and not bad decision making. 10s of thousands of companies have
| managed to figure out combatting API abuse without shooting
| themselves in the foot.
| creesch wrote:
| > If you work for a company and decide that people using 100
| API calls per day, hurts your company more than helps it..
| then most likely you are either unqualified for making these
| decisions
|
| You are entirely right, yet I see this train of thought
| happen so very often in different companies. Some of these
| people are a bit saner than others and actually do listen to
| others explaining why it is an idiotic train of thought.
| Others really are just see numbers in isolation and somehow
| refuse to look at them in context.
| sethammons wrote:
| How much money should yelp spend to help Restaurants continue
| to work?
| al_borland wrote:
| Was this a move to try and get some profit from AI companies
| trying to train on their data? With the API providing limited
| results, I'd think it would be of limited use. I always found
| Apple's use of it in Maps frustrating, because seeing POI details
| basically required I also have Yelp installed.
|
| If this move was AI driven, like with Reddit and others, I'm
| starting to dislike AI more and more... at least the rent seeking
| end of it, which seems to be slowing killing the open internet.
| shawn-butler wrote:
| I have seen many notices like this in the past few months. My
| guess is anbody of signficant size whose reason for existing
| includes curating user-generated content is trying to ensure that
| gen-AI ingestors don't swallow up their data through unpaid API
| access or scraping. (Maybe a podcast or article popular with CxO
| and IT directors on the topic??)
|
| Which they seemingly already have done anyway. Another unintended
| side-effect of the borderline illegal and generally immoral "AI"
| companies efforts to get as many data sets as possible.
| balls187 wrote:
| Curious how much money the app developer made, and how much they
| paid for Yelp API access.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I sold 467 copies over 10 years for less than $5 per copy. It's
| about $2000 in revenue. Surely not a good use of my time. But I
| liked the app and so did its few users. We should build things
| we want to use ourselves right? I think it was a much nicer and
| faster frontend to the Yelp restaurant directory than the Yelp
| website.
|
| Your other question about the cost is answered in the blog post
| and in several other comments I have left in this thread. In
| short, when I started the app 10 years ago there was no paid
| API (perhaps there was some kind of "enterprise" version but
| I'm not sure). The point of my post is how poorly they handled
| the transition from free->paid.
| balls187 wrote:
| 467 users seems like it would not trigger abnormal API usage.
|
| Sounds like Yelp sent a form letter.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Yes, definitely based on other people in this thread
| getting the same letter. It was an inaccurate and
| threatening form letter bizarrely sent from a personal
| email address of a Yelp employee with another personal
| email address CCed.
| kgeist wrote:
| But how was the API key stored? If it's stored inside the
| binary, without an intermediate server managed by OP,
| someone could've disassembled the binary and starting using
| the API key independently for their own gain, triggering
| abnormal usage. Say, one of our Windows products uses a web
| API for TTS, and we've built an intermediate web server
| which stores the key and manages rate limits per user so
| that there was no abuse (the app uses our own auth).
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Yelp has an API dashboard where you can see how many API
| calls have been made. I can tell you it was never
| exceeding 200 calls per day and often below 100.
| Terretta wrote:
| Dollars to donut stores, what's likely going on with the switch
| to expensive API is this:
|
| https://business.yelp.com/products/yelp-ads/
|
| Same as the Reddit stunt versus the Apollo app dev, except that
| his app had a big enough audience you'd think they'd have figured
| something out.
|
| Nope. The paid app meant money from users to the app dev instead
| of from advertisers to the site.
|
| What's strange is Reddit didn't seem to do the math on how
| _little_ they should have charged the app dev for API access if
| all they wanted was to offset revenue from that user base.
| Perhaps the fear was much as with TV streaming: they know
| advertisers want audiences willing to pay, not only the audiences
| seeking free.
| binkHN wrote:
| Reminds me of something Reddit did just recently...
|
| I think when the AI scraping funding models go away, all these
| APIs will magically open up again.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| We need to move towards "zero trust" for APIs.
|
| SaaS can provide "open core" or better yet simply sell a hosted
| version of their fully open source code. If the provider fails to
| provide, you can fall back to self hosting.
|
| The API equivalent would be open sourcing the data. This is the
| OpenStreetMap model. If the API provider fails to provide, you
| can fallback to the underlying data.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| This was the hope behind the StackExchange data dumps, that the
| community at large could always take their contributions
| elsewhere if the service jumped the shark.
|
| Well, before the SE organization tried to kill the data exports
| off in an attempt to commercialize it towards AI companies, but
| thats a whole other issue.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| That's asking too much. SaaS should give an option for you to
| export all your _own_ data in a simple, parseable format (like
| JSON). That 's about it. They don't owe anyone their source
| code, and they don't owe any ethically sourced data (such as
| employees researching and manually entering).
|
| API access needs better terms. Like guaranteed access for X
| years at $Y price with Z days notice if there's a change, where
| Z > 3 months or so.
| xvector wrote:
| This is just pure boneheadedness across the Yelp management
| chain, all the way down to the IC level.
|
| - IC should have recognized the site was driving traffic to Yelp
| and flagged to management.
|
| - Management should have realized that some API usage is
| beneficial to Yelp overall, and crafted a plan around this.
|
| Just pure insanity. If I were a VP I'd fire everyone involved for
| a lack of basic critical thinking skills.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Who could have predicted that a company with a scammy business
| model would have such shady behavior when it comes to changing
| API pricing models?
|
| /s
| mistercow wrote:
| A hard lesson I learned after several times getting burned in my
| time long ago doing indie stuff is "never depend on a single
| company without a backup plan".
|
| Sometimes this can be pretty difficult to even see. If you were a
| Mac shareware dev depending on VersionTracker and MacUpdate to
| drive downloads, with no actual marketing budget, you might not
| have noticed that you were implicitly relying on Apple _not_
| creating an App Store which would turn the entire ecosystem
| upside down.
|
| This is one of the reasons that it's so tough to make a business
| work at a small scale. In some ways, you have more flexibility
| than a big company, but the lack of capital means that certain
| events that a larger company would shrug off can totally upend
| everything you're doing.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| i use to be that guy telling people not to put their eggs in
| other peoples basket. Some laughed at me for a decade, almost
| convincingly and then...
|
| Of course my stuff also breaks because you cant really do
| anything anymore without trusting anything even against better
| judgement.
|
| I think we will eventually get expensive quality terms of service
| for those who think it might be fun if things work forever, like
| html documents and megalithic structures.
| smukherjee19 wrote:
| Sorry to hear how Yelp treated the OP...
|
| Given how many stories of greed and throwing people under the bus
| for money I hear nowadays, we might already be living in a
| dystopia.
| pino82 wrote:
| It was never different. Just, with the advent of iPhone, FB,
| WhatsApp, Youtube, etc, a lot of people basically decided to
| ignore this fact of life. So good and for so long that they
| completely forgot it. They forgot it good enough that even
| their childs got no education in that regard. And every some
| days, someone gets a lesson. ;)
|
| Why should Yelp not throw you under the bus for money?
|
| The problem was that (impersonal) you stopped understanding
| basic mechanisms of human interaction. For no real reason.
| 2099miles wrote:
| That's trash. I'll delete yelp over that, bad customer or dev
| relations sucks.
| pino82 wrote:
| What is the precise meaning of 'dev relations' here? What is
| the actual relation? They haven't ordered him to dev sth.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| If building an app on a platform does not increase the networks
| effects of that platform, this will always be the outcome.
|
| Good platforms get more valuable with more apps: iOS, Windows,
| etc
|
| Bad platforms don't get better with more apps: reddit, netflix,
| twitter. So they always end up killing the API.
| fluoridation wrote:
| The difference, I think, is that the former are platforms _to
| run applications_ while the latter are communication platforms.
| There used to be a time when the phone company could press
| charges if you connected your "app" (a tone-generating
| machine) to their "API" (the phone line) to "do things the
| official app didn't support" (place long distance calls for
| free). It will always be beneficial to someone who owns a
| communication channel to assume as much control of the pipe as
| possible. If Twitter could jack directly into your brain stem
| and refuse to work until you install its client on your
| wetware, it would.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| That was a long blog post to tell us that they are no longer
| entitled to valuable free API access. It was a mistake to think
| it would last. This story has been repeated so many times here.
| As soon as the author started making money (they conveniently
| excluded their sales revs), they should have negotiated a written
| contract for access for a fee. It could be cut of app revs or
| pure API charges. Also, I am sure some smart managers looked at
| all their free API giveaways and decided there we no longer
| useful to their business model.
| ndiddy wrote:
| The author disclosed his sales revenues here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124971 . He sold 467
| copies of the software after 10 years, for a total revenue of
| around $2000. He never exceeded 200 API calls per day. I don't
| think it would have been worth Yelp's time to negotiate for a
| percentage of that.
| jijji wrote:
| have you thought about writing your own API instead of using the
| de facto API? it may involve screen scraping but it also will be
| a lot more reliable and there's no limits, especially when using
| proxies....
|
| I've written thousands of tools that scrape websites and never
| used the apis for this reason, you can never trust the API,
| either because of the reliability, cost, limits imposed, etc...
| Nobody wants you pulling data from their site anyway, so you're
| back to scraping anyway, its better to start out there then to
| have to end up there years later for some other reason...
| petterroea wrote:
| Enshittification is at an all time high, and API access is being
| tightened and monetized in response to many industry factors
| including "freeloading" AI trainers.
|
| Cory Doctorow is right, if you want to disrupt, or make any
| improvement to an existing large platform, adversarial
| interoperability(that is, reverse engineering) is the only way
| forward and has to be explicitly legalized in cases where it's a
| tool for progress.
|
| My previous statement is arrogant, as it assumes developers are
| entitled to take any data they want and profit from it. It also
| puts services in a situation where harmful crawling like what is
| performed by some new AI actors with no experience is an expected
| thing. This is of course wrong, but I want to argue that had Yelp
| and other actors not wanted such a future, they shouldn't have
| tightened free access to their proper APIs where they have the
| ability to set ground rules and have the ability to talk to their
| users.
|
| Big companies are amazingly bad at keeping track of things
| internally - a promise in an e-mail is easily forgotten 10 years
| later. But why should the user be punished for Yelps lack of
| control?
| EGreg wrote:
| Building atop centralized platforms, you run this risk. In a
| decentralized environment, you'd be able to keep a fork running
| just as it was.
| caesil wrote:
| My son, it is time for you to embrace the good news of our lord
| and savior web scraping.
| reddalo wrote:
| You reminded me of this "meme" about APIs vs scraping:
| https://i.imgur.com/koPo3M0.png
| i_am_jl wrote:
| "his business is profitable" is a little too close to home.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| The big takeaway here is to never rely on a third party, they
| will inevitibly fuck you over.
|
| Every business will eventually turn anything that they can into a
| profitable feature for them.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I wrote a review for a grocery store turned food service shovel
| basically said "this will be the first store that charges for
| air." Guess what? I use their bathroom every other day,for
| free. I think it's been months since I bought anything, and I
| help myself to utensils.
|
| Every customer will eventually turn anything they can use for
| free, into a profitable feature for themselves.
|
| There was a book called the 1 minute manager: it was followed
| by a book called the 59 second employee.
|
| Never rely on an unscupulus third party, or if a third party
| becomes unscrupulous... Hunt them down.
|
| I disliked Yelp, and held it in deep distain, then while
| working for a service company, Yelp called. "For a fee we can
| remove all negative reviews." This is the definition of
| ensh*tification. So... I told him I would get back to him. I
| called a few numbers at Yelp and was basically able to socially
| engineer a vast list of their revinue growth supervisors.
|
| I made a list of every business in that city and the next, and
| related my experence, and how worthless a Yelp review was.
| Almost all the business responded to poor reviews with a 'i bet
| you are a Yelp employee drumming up money for fake reviews.'
| after a few weeks, I gathered up a lot of these, and sent a
| three page letter of them in a package with 50 of the Yelp
| peoples's names in it. I let that stew for a few days, and then
| called the idiot back. He said "we don't care." They don't.
| They do not care in the least. Google, OAth, and Facebook do
| not either. Hurt them in their advertising review and then they
| will listen.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > is that if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your
| app, you are at their whim.
|
| Well, yes. I think people figured that out more than 10 years ago
|
| And business models can and do change
|
| And by checking the pricing page, Yelp's commercial API is $15
| per 1000 API calls per month. Which sounds ok?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Right, they never answered my questions about the discrepancy
| between that and the pricing deck they specifically sent me for
| my app. See slide 3 with a $229 per month base price:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8...
|
| The economics of Restaurants actually mean it wouldn't be
| profitable either way though. That's how low the sales are.
|
| They're welcome to start charging for their API whatever they
| want, but they should give more than 4-days (Friday->Monday, 1
| business day) notice.
| isolli wrote:
| This feels important:
|
| > The other thing this taught me is the danger of an up-front
| paid model for apps that depend on ongoing access to third-party
| services. If users were continually paying for the app, paying
| for Yelp's APIs would not be as much of an issue. And I wouldn't
| feel as guilty about the app being discontinued since if the fees
| were charged on a monthly basis, they would just end at the same
| time the app ceased to exist instead of facing an expectation
| upon purchase of "forever access." On the other hand, how would
| you charge a monthly fee for an app that people are only willing
| to spend less than $5 for upfront?
|
| There are apps that I like and would like to purchase, but paying
| e.g. 24 euros per year feels like too much. So I stick with the
| free version...
| sethammons wrote:
| Could pivot to customer provided api keys :\
| knallfrosch wrote:
| > But due to the way that the Mac App Store works we don't have
| our customers' email nor any way to directly refund them.
|
| > if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you
| are at their whim.
|
| I think you might also want to revisit your relationship with
| Apple Incorporated.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Yes, for sure. Some people explain it away as "well if you buy
| Wrangler jeans from Walmart and there's something wrong with
| them you ask Walmart for a refund." So if you buy X's app from
| Apple you ask Apple for a refund. That kind of makes sense. But
| if Wrangler does a recall, they have a way of getting that
| across to their customers.
| shever73 wrote:
| We've been bitten by going the "free 3rd-party <x>" route so many
| times, so I sympathise with the problem here.
|
| Off-topic, but kudos to OP for still engaging with the threads.
| This certainly wasn't a dump and run post. They've probably spent
| more time answering questions here than they did developing the
| app!
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Author here. I actually discovered something in their terms of
| use today while looking up something else that someone had asked
| me in this thread:
|
| "2. CHANGES Yelp reserves the right to modify the API Agreement
| at any time. If Yelp reasonably determines that a modification
| may materially and adversely impact You, Yelp will provide email
| notice to you using the email address you provided during
| registration no less than ten (10) days prior to the material
| adverse modification taking affect. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE
| BOUND TO ANY NEW OR MODIFIED TERMS, YOU MUST TERMINATE THE API
| AGREEMENT BY CEASING USE OF THE API WITHIN TEN (10) DAYS OF
| RECEIPT OF SUCH NOTICE."
|
| So, the 4-days would have violated their original notification
| terms of use anyway. I think they realized this after the fact of
| sending all of us the threatening emails and this is why they
| ultimately closed my API key after 10-days as described in my
| original post.
|
| Anyway, just an interesting aside that the poorly written,
| inaccurate original email that I shared in my original post was
| even inaccurate to their own policies.
| nashashmi wrote:
| "YOU MUST TERMINATE" rather than be held to the original terms
| you initially signed up for ... because Yelp RESERVES the
| right.
|
| We have all now been reminded that RESERVED RIGHTS can and will
| be used against you maliciously. And if you want protection
| from such malice, there needs to be a RIGHTS of the USER
| clause.
|
| This should be handled and enforced by government statutes.
|
| (It is an amazing world we live in where rights of the user
| have to be expressed.)
| romwell wrote:
| 10 days.
|
| How very generous of them.
| ginko wrote:
| Is Yelp even still relevant these days?
|
| At least where I am in Europe I find it incredibly outdated,
| showing restaurants that have closed a long long time ago and
| none of the new ones.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| It seems to be mostly a US phenomenon. As I pointed out in the
| post almost all of Restaurants sales were to the US. The
| directory is very up-to-date with active reviews everywhere
| that I've travelled in this country.
| EricE wrote:
| Digital sharecropping. I don't know what the answer is, but it's
| sad to see it unfolding!
| pino82 wrote:
| I'd say, no you had no shared customers. Yelp had the customers,
| and you wrote some app that uses Yelp. For no real reason you
| assumed that you could be part of them (as with Facebook
| earlier). Sure you had some kind of informal permission at first.
| And then they revoked it. That's their right to do, right? Maybe
| you should not write Facebook or Yelp apps, if you are neither
| Facebook nor Yelp nor asked by them to write clients for their
| walled gardens. Or if you really want, set up an actual license
| agreement with them. Those networks are walled gardens and they
| don't want to cooperate with you that way. They are just not
| those kinds of shops which you can cuddle with. If you want to
| create something that has an own value, create something more
| than just another Faceyelptwitterddit frontend.
|
| The good thing: You took your lesson. Maybe this time it was
| sufficient to actually learn sth.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > I'd say, no you had no shared customers.
|
| Person pays for my app. That was a customer.
|
| Person who paid for my app also later uses the Yelp website via
| a link for a specific review from my app. Also a customer.
|
| Therefore shared customers.
|
| > Sure you had some kind of informal permission at first.
|
| I don't know why you would define it as informal. They had an
| official review process for deciding what apps to grant higher
| daily API limits. My app went through that review process 10
| years ago including considering its functionality, screenshots,
| and I believe I even sent them a prototype back then. We had a
| few emails back and forth to confirm my intentions to only
| develop for the Mac and what I was building.
|
| I'm sure that got lost in the corporate shuffle over 10 years
| but I clearly had their permission to build the app and in fact
| given the relatively high API limit they gave (25000 per day
| versus the free at that time 10 years ago I think being 1000
| per month), arguably blessing.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Author here--seems they noticed that people were unhappy. Just
| got this email from Yelp (August 1, 2024):
|
| > Earlier this month, we sent you an email about your Yelp Fusion
| API usage. That email gave developers until July 23rd to contact
| us if they want to continue using Yelp's data for use in their
| app. We realize you might need more time and are extending your
| free access for an additional 90 days starting today. Your access
| should be available now.
|
| > We're sorry for any inconvenience or frustration this
| abbreviated transition might have caused. Please respond to this
| email or contact us at api@yelp.com if you have any questions.
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