As you correctly state, their servers aren’t free and hammering them will incur a ban. On the other hand if you are a high profile user why not copy the free da

As you correctly state, their servers aren’t free and hammering them will incur a ban. On the other hand if you are a high profile user why not copy the free data from http://planet.openstreetmap.org http://planet.openstreetmap.org and have your own server? Or if this is technically difficult, you can find paid for services with OSM data (I guess if you go down this road, it’s like paying Google)