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.
They never answered my question about the discrepancy between these prices and the prices on their website. Both would be too high to make Restaurants low sales sustainable.
That said, I'll say again that they were perfectly in their right to start charging for their API. They just should not have done so with 4-days notice and with such a threatening email.
$10 per request at the lowest tier of enhanced?! The only business case I can think of for this is if you save all the data in your own database then serve requests for your own service out of your own cache. I guess if the Yelp data doesn't change very often, then you just choose to stay 6-months behind on the data or something...
Interesting and an excellent read. The death spiral at Travelocity (pre-Expedia acquisition) worked differently and was partially self-induced.
Some background is required first. Travelocity was the first online travel agency (OTA). I believe they started around 1996.
Through most of its life at that point all, I mean 95%+, of its success came from only two factors: best marketing in industry and growth of the internet. This is severely problematic because marketing only gets you so far in business. Conversely Expedia had really shitty marketing in comparison and yet came to dominate the industry because they were extremely aggressive at growing their supplier relations.
You cannot EVER rely on growth of media adoption, like mom and pop coming online, because once that stops you have no fuel left in the tank. Reliance on growth of a media platform is like a gravy train that you did nothing to build and returns amazing wealth if you are in the right place at the right time, but once it stagnates its like your train derails and everybody dies. That is because everybody expects growth to continue, except you did nothing to earn the growth and now have no answers and nothing to show for it. This was around later 2008 when I joined the company and became unavoidably obvious to everybody over the next year.
So, at that point what do you do? You competitors are far out pacing you by ignoring fun stuff, marketing, technology, and all the other bullshit that technology people look to. Instead they are focusing on core business principles and eating your golden goose while laughing at you. So, what do you do?
In the case of Travelocity all the executives leave. New executives come into trying to figure out what to do. Like every great web business they focus more aggressively on marketing and advertising. This was Travelocity's death spiral.
You have to understand that people DO NOT like advertisements. Really, I know its surprising, but when your site becomes littered with advertisements everywhere and all kinds of hidden telemetry people will leave and never come back. Your wonderful palace has become a trailer park.
The business loves advertising. Revenue from advertisements is immediate. That is really significant. In e-commerce there is a massive lag between each stage of profit, revenue, and sales because you have to account for the cost of operations, sales, and inventory. The more expensive the product the longer the lag and that lag really complicates projections. So advertisements are like cocaine, because they immediately return profit that requires no effort while rotting your health slowly until you are a hollow skeleton.
To be fair they were doing amazing things with inventory and pricing that was vastly superior to what the competition was doing after the leadership turn over. This was too little too late though. These innovations could have saved the business provided more time and the same level of discipline, but not when you are already in a death spiral.
My learning from this is that a business that earns profit from selling something directly should not fuck up conversion or go out of its way to make customers hate them. When I put that way it sounds obvious, but web business get that wrong all the time because they get distracted by shiny things.
>To be fair they were doing amazing things with inventory and pricing that was vastly superior to what the competition was doing after the leadership turn over. This was too little too late though. These innovations could have saved the business provided more time and the same level of discipline, but not when you are already in a death spiral.
So in the travel industry you have limited lines of business, primarily: air, hotels, and car rentals. Air is super low margin because its set directly by the supplier plus some arbitrary service fee, typically $7 per ticket. Air is high volume though and is the primary draw for OTA customers, so it cannot be ignored. Rental cars are super low priority because they are both low margin and low volume.
The real interest in the travel agency business is on hotel inventory. This is how Expedia came to dominate the industry, because they aggressively hired geographically focused hotel relationship personnel and Travelocity wasn't keeping up. So Expedia had much greater inventory from various different properties and stronger relationships with those properties for their business prioritization. Hotels, typically hate dealing with OTAs, because OTAs are a transparent barrier between the hotel and the guest staying at the hotel, but the OTAs bring people to the properties. The name of the game for hotels is "heads in beds" and while up-selling is beneficial if you get the "heads in beds" part wrong you cannot exist.
The margin on hotel properties is much higher and highly variable. Hotels in many cases will even eat the cost of airfare to get heads in beds if the pricing is right. That provides a huge opportunity for a marriage between smart hotel systems and OTAs because the hotels are doing the smarter inventory management and the OTAs are supplying the airfare volume and customers to populate that smart inventory management. The hotel data systems, Property Management Systems (PMS), were at that time much smarter than the inventory availability OTAs had, because they had to do much more to account for seasonal volume planning and various customer demands.
Where Travelocity was strong was in writing algorithms to account for these considerations and offer volume pricing discounts the competition could not and also air + hotel package pricing at massive discounts the competition could not compete with. In parallel Travelocity was slowly building up a corporate travel business to take advantage of that volume pricing intelligence and at one point had both WalMart and Lockheed-Martin as customers.
Again, both of those were amazing and could have really helped retake lost market, but conquering competition is a fragile slow process while advertising is immediate.
> they also told me my usage was higher than other developers...
I'm curious to what they compare this. The non-existent free plan where everything higher than 0 is unusual. Or a large mass of dead accounts who have really zero to none usage. Or the actually paying account who are now on their enterprise plan. In the later case, this might indicate some real problem if their usage is low enough that smaller projects are already exceptional.
Author points to data showing 300m active users in 2013, 2b active users now, yet claims that Instagram is over. What is the replacement? Where is the decline?
Author is in what some would call an NYC cool kid media bubble, and you know, those cool kids aren't using it anymore, which means no on who matters does (2billion active dorks notwithstanding)
Not good news at all. You might be able to get away with 5.7 updates for awhile coupled with a plugin like Wordfence, but sooner or later it'll be be too insecure to run as hackers are always trying to get into older Wordpress versions.
Any chance your gov users can update to edge? I know it will be difficult to setup the settings again, but it has to be done at some point.
Hey, thanks for reading! I wish I could have gone into detail with more of the headers but as you probably saw that was a 13 minute read going into one of them... and that could have been repeating for at least another 10.
I can see why they allowed scripts for SVG's but I completely agree with you that scripts should never be executed for <img>. The potential for exploits far outweighs the benefit of it.
I personally use Firebase for all my static sites. Completely free and fast. If you need to run some backend function they have Firebase functions which is free to a certain degree too.
The fact that you cannot put a cap on your spending is infuriating (the official AWS answer is "we do not want to break your business" (even if I want to)).
To be fair, some complaining or crying in such cases usually gets your bill reversed.
You don't mean literally distributed denial of service attack, right? It's super easy to keep serving a static resource, so I think you'd need a huge amount of traffic to put a dent in Firebase's static hosting capacity.
I've had spikes of up to 300k visitors to my Firebase blog in a month, and the bill was like $150. It seems hard to get bitten by huge surprise costs from a blog on Firebase static hosting, even if someone's using a botnet to try to drive up your bill.
Edit: Thinking about it a little more, I guess you could find the largest resource on a blog and direct your botnet to download it nonstop repeatedly, and that would be orders of magnitude more expensive than even large organic traffic.
> so I think you'd need a huge amount of traffic to put a dent in Firebase's static hosting capacity.
No, I was referring to your bill, when your resource usage spikes (really spikes, as in sustained Gbps+ traffic spikes). Many people were taken aback by the unexpected bills.
One of those stories that get posted every other month about "How I racked up $xx000 bill for Firebase" explained that they had billing alarms but they weren't exactly real time.
Also, you might be the main/only site administrator, in which case falling asleep might end up badly for you.
The idea that you can do so is pretty fundamental in politics. It's how the federal government justified the US Civil War, for example, and how the Founding Fathers justified a lot of things that tend to get glossed over in grade school history books.
The debate ultimately hinges on sympathies. For someone who wholeheartedly supports BLM, the riots might be regarded as something that was regrettable, but also understandable. In the words of Martin Luther King, "A riot is the language of the unheard." The observation also works in the direction of the Capitol insurrection. The rioters were there because they believed that their opinion on the election was not being heard.
Deciding which group had more grounds to be angry is left as an exercise for the reader.
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.