Indeed, I tried to make the experience as non-intrusive as possible. One of the biggest complaints from Tweepsect was that people didn't want to OAuth to try it

Indeed, I tried to make the experience as non-intrusive as possible. One of the biggest complaints from Tweepsect was that people didn't want to OAuth to try it out. Especially if I play the angle of "use SocialGrapple for corporate intelligence" I can imagine users may be weary to give away their true credentials, which is fine. I applied to have my @SocialGrapple account whitelisted 6+ months ago (a bit pre-emptive, but not enough), but they never got back to me and then last month they announced there will be no more whitelisting. This sucks. Right now I just try to use the API as efficiently as possible and spread jobs out to avoid hitting the limits. In the future, I might need to distribute the load across multiple auths or request the user to sign in. I tried to make the pricing in-line with the parts that are "expensive" to me, both in terms of limited API calls and data storage/performance. I hope this is transparent enough to the users and doesn't get in the way. I have looked at using gnip (Twitter's official bulk data reseller) but the pricing structure is way out of my league (starting at $500/mo). Can't blame them though, since they dedicate an EC2 instance to each customer. Pretty cool scaling model.