Pay-per-use is just the simplest and most straightforward and possibly fairest way to couple the value your API gives someone with the amount they pay in return

Pay-per-use is just the simplest and most straightforward and possibly fairest way to couple the value your API gives someone with the amount they pay in return. Or, from the eyes of the user, they get full access to the API yet don't have to pay much if their project gets no traction. The downside is that users can lie, but it's mainly just low-end users who would lie. Pay-per-user licenses are similar: a startup or a hackathon is most likely to share the license between a few people while larger companies are going to be honest because (1) they can afford it and (2) they don't want trouble at scale. So you can ignore most abuse. The problem with other payment structures for ListenNotes is that it's a relatively small database. You can clone the whole thing trivially. It doesn't even mirror/host the audio feeds. Its only value is that it put in the work of structuring and normalizing the metadata. If you built a business on top of ListenNotes, you'd save more and more money as you grow bigger and bigger if you were simply cloning the whole thing with your own crawler. So the more value you would get from ListenNotes, the less you're actually paying them. Or ListenNotes would have to price their per-call fee so high that they could somehow capture a fair price for that value yet shut out smaller users. Turns out "courtesy agreements" generally do work at scale as larger companies become less and less likely to lie just like they become less and less likely to pirate Photoshop. > have a lower entry point than the $100pcm that's a flat-fee for some but not all extra features, showing images at all (and not in free), for example. The downside of this is that now you limit what people can build on cheaper tiers. In fact maybe they can't even build their compelling product without whatever content you're paywalling behind tiers they can't afford on day 1, while the goal is to let someone build anything they want on day 1 so that they are a large end-user on day 1000. After all, the ideal isn't that you scale value with your customer's income but rather you scale in price as they convert value into income. It, of course, is all just trade-offs.