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>particularly if a manufacturer of popular installable energy-related hardware or software decided to wire things up so all their customers fetched degree days

>particularly if a manufacturer of popular installable energy-related hardware or software decided to wire things up so all their customers fetched degree days from our system whether they wanted them or not. I always check the TOS of any "public" API I use, and I suspect most developers are the same. Perhaps this could be mitigated by some carefully-worded clauses? If someone does it anyway, you could protect yourself by blacklisting their API key for TOS violation. We should continue this over email.

bromley 15y ago
It's possible that could work. Our current testing API is rate limited only on IP address but if we required a sign-up we'd have more options. A free tier couldn't go too far out of control if we could stop taking new sign-ups at any time. But at the same time we already have a full free tier in the sense that anyone can download free data from the website. At the moment we're seeing the API purely as something for those that want more data than the website practically allows. My hunch is that it's probably best to keep the API paid only... Free accounts with really low rate limits would be frustrating for the people using them (as they'd hit their rate limit all the time) and would just increase our support costs. In the end we'd have to increase the costs of new paid accounts to support them, which is not something I'd want to do. Never say never though... My thoughts on that could change over time as we get more customers and feedback. I got your email, thanks, will get back to you shortly :)