That is a good idea, but I don't think it does enough to serve the purpose - the point of brownouts is to trigger their error/alert system. If the API is just b

That is a good idea, but I don't think it does enough to serve the purpose - the point of brownouts is to trigger their error/alert system. If the API is just being slower than usual, it won't trigger anything. Even if a human was reviewing it manually (which is quite unlikely), they would only think "oh, their API's really getting slower these days, sad". There'd be nothing that indicates "The API is going to get shut down in a month and I need to move off of it ASAP!". Random, intermittent API failures would lead you to go check the API status out, and in the process you'd find out "oh, this API is going away". Edit: On the point of rate limiting, I think the problem with it is that it'll affect everyone using the API all the time, not just during the brownout period. It effectively shuts the API down for everyone still using it (if the rate limit is too low, and if it isn't, then it won't be noticed by low-use consumers).