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After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
- guywithahat 2y agoI would be upset too, but this sort of sounds like someone did him a favor 10 years ago, management changed, and now management wants him to pay. This sucks, but near infinite free api calls sounds unsustainable
- WoodenChair 2y agoWell the thing is they gave me 25000 per day, but the actual use was less than 100. The 25000 number is almost a red herring to the rest of the story. It’s understandable they went to paid. What’s not understandable is the 4 days notice and tone of the email.
- justinclift 2y agoA 25,000 calls per day limit for an API sounds absurdly low. Any idea if the API calls actually would have used much in the way of backend resources, or do you reckon it was more just mostly a database lookup?
- WoodenChair 2y agoI would be surprised if it were much more than a database lookup.
- justinclift 2y agoYeah, it's probably that simple. 25k calls may only be a few seconds worth of actual database runtime too, if that.
- Nextgrid 2y agoAPI rate-limits have always been a cash grab and a way to discourage efficient automated use in favor of getting a human to "engage" instead.
- azmarks 2y agoWe received the exact same letter from Yelp. Our usage is significantly higher and when we talked to them, the prices they quoted were ridiculously high (thousands of dollars a month).
- WoodenChair 2y agoSorry to hear that. What was your product?
- azmarks 2y agoWe have a analytics SaaS which displays, among many other pieces of data, ratings from different providers, including Yelp. I assumed that Yelp had been doing this all along and we ran above some predetermined limit, but the email we received was identical to yours. So I'm thinking that Yelp is trying its best to monetize all API users
- algo_trader 2y ago> a analytics SaaS which displays, among many other pieces of data, Does yelp (or others) allow the restaurant to modify the menu/offer coupons in a dynamic way? (i.e. change multiple times per hour, update with in minutes) thanks
- pino82 2y agoIf the price is too high for you, here is my idea for you: don't use their product. ;)
- WoodenChair 2y agoExactly, we're not. We're closing our products. They are perfectly welcome to charge too high a price for us. They just should've communicated it better.
- uniclaude 2y agoHonestly, making people pay for an app that only uses a public API you’re not paying for, and no form of fallback is asking for trouble. This is not a responsible way to do business and I hope people reading this thread will understand that.
- pino82 2y agoSince ~15 years, people got the idea that all the WhatsApps, Instagrams or Twitters around them aren't companies, but kind of public infrastructure. They all knew that it's a wrong assumption, but it's sooo convenient, and at some point, people around you force you in that direction, even if you don't like all those walled gardens. And once this wrong philosophy was established, people started escalating it to some smaller shops, I guess. Those are also the guys that complain when some 3rd party Reddit or Youtube hobby clients must disappear. They just have no understanding at all about some basic mechanics of human interaction. The biggest problem: There are entire generations of people nowadays with that misunderstanding.
- gunapologist99 2y ago> near infinite free api calls but the author pointed out that it drove traffic to Yelp, and that almost certainly seems to be true. In fact, little integration plays like this app might have been the only thing keeping Yelp sort-of alive after Google got into the game. Killing off your bizdev partners seems incredibly short-sighted and foolish. (Also, feeding the reviews into an AI... for what, exactly? To train a model on how to write reviews? Or perhaps to detect fake reviews -- actually, that was an issue on Yelp even before AI, so it seems like it wouldn't be the best training content.)
- m463 2y agoI think this is the giant internet trick... do anything to scale, then when you reach critical mass (or someone wants OKRs on their status report), pull out the rug.
- WoodenChair 2y agoTo be fair there wasn’t much scale. We’re talking about an app that sold 467 copies over its 10 year span. But it was an app I really liked, the people who paid for it really liked, and just drove traffic to Yelp, so they should’ve liked too. It was also a nice portfolio piece for me.
- m463 2y agolol, I was talking about yelp. I'm pretty sure when they made the API, it was actually laying out the rug. Let everyone build on top of it.
- 20after4 2y agoYeah, given the numbers it doesn't make sense for Yelp to kill it. It's not like a few hundred api calls are costing yelp any significant amount of money.
- pino82 2y agoI'd say, given the numbers it doesn't make sense for Yelp to bother. Just stop it and send the kids an email.
- gunapologist99 2y agoWow. less than 47 copies per year on average.. Yelp really cut off their nose to spite their face there. Even leaving out that it was with only a grotesquely unprofessional four day notice, this is ridiculous. It's not like Yelp was suffering a DDoS from all of those API calls.
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- altairprime 2y agoI think Yelp is shutting off their API for the same reason as Reddit: to ensure that AI training makes money for them. It sucks that you’re a drive-by casualty of that, and if I’d bought this app, then - same as Apollo iOS - I would not request a refund.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI think nobody wants an API. The same reason why YouTube plays cat-and-mouse with yt-dl and longs for the sweet nectar of Widevine DRM To wit, there is exactly one business strategy: When you are small, be nice. When you are big, pull that ladder up behind you.
- mschuster91 2y ago> To wit, there is exactly one business strategy: When you are small, be nice. When you are big, pull that ladder up behind you. I'd add a "in venture capital and big capital" after "business strategy". When you don't have VCs or the stonk market breathing down your neck all the time, incentives massively change. IMHO, there is only one solution left... once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust that has a clear mandate to run its companies in a way beneficial to society at large. That way the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on countless r&d experiments, VC investors have a perspective to payout, and the world gets kept from utter bullshit like API games.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoWell if small capital doesn't pay good, I have no incentive to run a small business at all! > once a publicly traded company gains critical market dominance and is reasonably profitable, the government buys all shares at the current market price and places the company in a public-good trust Interesting, haven't heard that one. I'll say maybe. I'd rather have Facebook not exist at all than have it be an *official* arm of the NSA
- 2y ago
- jcrash 2y agoYelp sucks. I wish Apple Maps would drop it like a hot potato.
- s1gsegv 2y agoYep I specifically keep Google Maps around to find restaurants even though I far prefer the audible navigation from Apple Maps nowadays once I actually want to drive there.
- tonymet 2y agoi do the same. Plus Apple Maps handles audio and lock screen much better. Apple must be calling a private API to manage lock screen during driving. When I drive with Google Maps, the screen locks and blocks navigation
- stemlord 2y agoTheir website should be a primary case study for normalizing ux dark patterns
- gunapologist99 2y agoEspecially since there were apparently complaints that Yelp was doing pay-to-play with good reviews for a while, which diminishes the truthiness value of any reviews: https://www.dailydot.com/via/yelp-extortion-lawsuit/ https://www.dailydot.com/via/yelp-extortion-lawsuit/ https://cutthroatmarketing.com/heres-why-you-shouldnt-advertise-on-yelp/ https://cutthroatmarketing.com/heres-why-you-shouldnt-advert... https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/h9ohs6/has_anyone_had_yelp_essentially_extort_them/ https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/h9ohs6/has_a... (Anecdotally, I also seem to be seeing this on Google Maps now! It seems like highly rated but local restaurants don't even show up on the map at all until I zoom in literally to the building -- perhaps because the owners don't pay for ads? Crazy if true... and Bing maps seem to not have all the restaurants or ratings, and you can't seem to filter based on rating either, which seems like a massive Bing fail. Maybe the review apps were always destined to crumble under a business model that encourages dishonesty on both sides..)
- 2y ago
- grugagag 2y agoI think Yelp needs to just die at this point. Reviews are gamed, usability is worse and worse. Not sure anyone still uses or trusts Yelp. They’re just in inertia from their better times.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoIs there a more open reviews platform not associated with a company? OpenReviews sort of thing or perhaps an open POI database associated with OSM, with reviews as attributes? Somewhat silly we’re still relying on big companies to collect this data when they then gate it. The timing is right with LLMs that can make maintaining and rating reviews less burdensome on human labor (“moderation” broadly speaking). It’s just text blobs and possibly images linked to people and places.
- null0ranje 2y agoI’m not sure that this is something that scales. Online reviews seems to attract only the worst in mass media (e.g., gamed reviews, complaint box for influencers who don’t get “VIP” treatment). The traditional restaurant reviewer filled this role much better. His role as a trusted arbiter was closer to what people want from a site like Yelp, but it’s very labor intensive and obviously doesn’t scale.
- etrautmann 2y agoBut then reviews are heavily biased by the taste of a tiny reviewer pool, which prevents breakout surprises and new ideas etc.
- ghaff 2y agoI'm honestly not sure how big a problem that was. If anything, critics tend towards the the new and unusual because they're bored. The problem is much more that no one is willing to pay for them.
- brookst 2y ago
- jsonis 2y agoQuestion-- with the yelp api now being paywalled-- and obviously you'd have to write code to handle scraping-- but can you legally scrape yelp to do this? Does the linkedin scraping lawsuit permit scraping yelp?
- _nalply 2y agoIt seems that you still can spin the Wheel of Lunch, but there are only generic proposals like Pizza, Ramen, Thai Food, and so on.
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoIf the api was as basic as you say, can you replace it with some screen scraping on yelp’s site?
- SoftTalker 2y agoProbably not without violating other terms of service.
- ycombinatrix 2y agoI don't care about Yelp's terms of service, do you?
- SoftTalker 2y agoYou will when a process server hands you a notice.
- stavros 2y agoA notice of what? It's not illegal to violate someone's random wishlist. It's not like you've signed a contract with them.
- jandrese 2y agoTypically for copyright infringement. They'll sue you for the maximum legal damages possible per copy, multiplied by the number of times your bot loaded a page, probably in the trillions of dollars.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoSo have the bot act on behalf of the user, using workers run on the user's machine. That's fair use.
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- egamirorrim 2y agoReal scumbag move from Yelp, sorry to read this man
- CuriouslyC 2y agoYelp is a scumbag company, I'm surprised it's still in business as it's reviled by business owners and TripAdvisor crushes it in its segment.
- calmbonsai 2y agoNot surprising at all. Yelp, Paypal and their ilk deserve all of their earned derision for, amazingly, being simultaneously user, customer, and developer hostile. Related to the earlier "old & grumpy" 3rd party API post, I've seen far too many, otherwise, outstanding businesses held hostage and summarily executed by either sudden un-explained usage-tier/throttling policies without economic recompense or the outright deactivation of API keys w/o notice or explanation.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI'm sorry to read that. Unfortunately, it isn't an uncommon story. > if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you are at their whim. That's the money quote, there. I avoid using third-party APIs like the plague. I have written backend aggregators and facias, to avoid having to use the API. I Just. Will. Not. embed an opaque codeball into my app. I'm a cranky old bastard, I know, but I sleep well at night.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoAmen. Doing the wrong thing is easy. Doing the right thing is hard. These are thermodynamically-mandated rules that cannot ever be circumvented by cleverness or money or hard work.
- stavros 2y agoTherefore, doing the easy thing is wrong.
- withinboredom 2y agoUsually. If you are doing the easy thing, so can your competitors. Your competition usually can't do the hard things.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoNot necessarily. p=>q does not mean q=>p, after all.
- leros 2y agoI built a service around helping podcasters automatically convert their audio podcast into a YouTube channel. I went through tons of review with Google in order to get access to the YouTube API and make sure everything I was doing was in compliance with their terms - literally months of back and forth. I had been testing in my development and staging environments against their API for 6+ months. I launched in production, got a few videos uploaded to YouTube, and they disabled my API key. I spent months emailing them and never got anything more than the same boilerplate copy/pasted answer. I could have pivoted or something, but I just shut it down and moved on. Lesson learned.
- giancarlostoro 2y agoTheir loss of additional content, traffic and ad revenue.
- ta1243 2y agoThe impact on google losing $10m of revenue is exactly equal to the impact of John Doe losing $10m of revenue In a competitive market John Doe would go to one of googles competitors. We don't have a competitive market. We have winner takes all market.
- giancarlostoro 2y agoSure, its $10m today, but think of all the other potential startups that they're doing this to, and how many millions they're throwing away, and billions over the long haul. Reddit, Twitter, and company all got big because they had open APIs and people were able to use them extensively for really creative things. I agree, Google has swallowed up the video streaming market unfortunately. I keep thinking back to how Vine was basically TikTok, and they threw it away.
- nemothekid 2y ago>Sure, its $10m today, but think of all the other potential startups that they're doing this to, and how many millions they're throwing away, and billions over the long haul. Google made $300B last year. "billions over the long haul" is a lot of money, an unimaginable amount even, to you and I. But to Google?
- billylo 2y agoI am in the same boat, sadly. I am particularly disappointed by the generic "Your API usage is higher than lots of other Yelp Fusion developers" statement. My giveback service has a tiny user-base and find it hard to believe my API usage level can be higher than average. https://try-something-new.web.app https://try-something-new.web.app was built a couple years ago.
- RIMR 2y agoThat statement is an outright lie too. Not only are they operating at less than 1% of what the free plan offered, but the email doesn't tell them the honest truth: That the free plan is reaching sunset, and they want all API users to switch to a paid plan. This isn't unreasonable, but they absolutely should provide more than 1 business day notice.
- WoodenChair 2y agoAbsolutely. You wrote it better than I did myself in the original post.
- account42 2y agoPerhaps theere are a lot of inactive API users with zero usage so the statement is technically true ;)
- billylo 2y agoTextbook half truths. :-|
- pino82 2y agoOf course it's generic and perhaps not a technically correct statement. And now? Why should they spend time on writing you nicer emails? What was your value to them? Zero? Or is that too optimistic actually?
- woah 2y agoSurprised the guy never even inquired as to how much the API access to support 100 API calls per day would cost. After 2 seconds of idle research, I have found that it would cost less than a dollar a day. https://docs.developer.yelp.com/page/start-your-free-trial https://docs.developer.yelp.com/page/start-your-free-trial
- franciscop 2y agoA dollar a day is $30/month, and at $1.99/sale that means OP would need to sell 15 apps ONLY to break even, which given the comments in the blog might be close to reality. This is pennies for both sides, but the way that Yelp distastefully contacted OP is probably worth just shutting the whole thing, it's not like OP was making bank on the app to begin with.
- stevarino 2y agoThrow on taxes, administrative overheads, etc, they are probably looking at 30-45 sales per month. Which is likely not realistic. On top of that, this is a continuous payment. Even if I was looking at 5-10x rate of return, I would be very hesitant as that's the rate-of-return today while the sales are forever. I've been wondering how realistic microsubscriptions are... Say $1-2 dollars a month per user to maintain an app, perhaps limited to just power users, would support a lot of infrastructure.
- WoodenChair 2y agoIt's just not worth working with a partner that will shut you off at 4-days notice. In addition though, they shared the following pricing deck with me: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ84a17J/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8... Which seems to indicate a base price of $229 per month. I have no idea why that doesn't line up with the pricing on their website. But the fact that they shared it with me indicated to me that my use case fell under some kind of "enterprise" usage. Regardless, I would not continue to work with them after 4-days notice and the threatening email. It's too small and app for it to be worth it to me. I did ask in one of my emails about the pricing discrepancy and got no reply.
- egberts1 2y agoI think Yelp marketing is on an incredible shortsighted and profit-losing path. I too used the macos App. Looking forward to Apple Map dumping Yelp, because that combo doesn't work for me and I do not want Yelp cluttering my Apple map.
- xyst 2y agoI think Apple has been developing a yelp clone internally; and have been slowly releasing bits and pieces. Apple has added rating systems for destinations. Amenities available at location (ie, “accepts Apple Pay”, dog/cat friendly). Maybe in the next decade Yelp integration will be phased out completely
- crooked-v 2y agoThey've already got something in Maps that switches locations from Yelp reviews to the Apple thumbs up/down system once they hit some critical mass of data, and the same for location photos.
- physicsguy 2y agoIt's not even popular outside of the US, I'm not sure how they can grow with that. If I look at my closest city in the UK at restaurants, nothing has been reviewed recently (2018, 2019) and it's mostly from US visitors coming here.
- xyst 2y agoyelp had so much potential but they pissed it all away. Google brain raped them [1,2]. Then they never recovered from it. Then there is ongoing issues between merchants and yelp [3] Yelp used to be a great place to find some decent place to eat in a new city. But the platform has gotten stale. Reviews are less reliable. Star rating often not useful. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-illegally-took-content-from-amazon-yelp-tripadvisor-ftc-report https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-il... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/06/google-takes-on-yelp-elites-with-its-new-local-guides-program/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/06/google-takes-on-yelp-elite... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp
- BobaFloutist 2y agoYelp suffers from the classic issue of not having a way to monetize that isn't a conflict of interest with their core business model. Google search has the same issue.
- simonw 2y ago> First of all, I was not “trialing” the Yelp API. I had been using it for a decade and had official permission from Yelp to create Restaurants. This looks like a Face/Off situation to me. (Spoiler alert for a 1997 action movie: in Face/Off a cop surgically exchanges faces with an imprisoned villain in order to go undercover in their organization, but the villain then murders everyone who knew about the swap and steals the cop's life.) Somebody at Yelp in 2014 knew that you had been approved to build this app. That person almost certainly no longer worked at Yelp ten years later, so the institutional knowledge of that agreement had likely been lost.
- WoodenChair 2y agoThat's fair, but you'd think their admin interface would show how long an app had been active for and any notes about the app from the beginning. Regardless, even if it had been active for 10 months not 10 years, 4-days notice is unacceptable.
- SenHeng 2y agoUsually it would've been a 2 day notice. The great magnanimous Yelp noticed it was a weekend and decided to give the author another 2 days. /s
- simonw 2y agoOh I completely agree - 4 days notice is _never_ OK. I get uncomfortable with 30 days notice because I've had the occasional vacation that long! Ideally they'd have a notes field against developer apps and a robust process for recording this kind of thing - but I've worked for companies, so it doesn't surprise me at all that there's no good mechanism in place for that.
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y ago> I get uncomfortable with 30 days In real life, sometimes months isn't enough. On August 5, UPS will complete their API transition to OAuth based authorization after many months of process. Many of my customers haven't responded to my attempts to warn them about the change. I've resigned myself at this point to August 5 being a crazy day.
- eddieroger 2y ago> It seemed they were in fact encouraging me to finish the app and release it. That was quite the assumption. They gave you access to something for free, not encouragement. I do feel bad for OP, but they weren't paying for the API, and should not have had any assumption that it would last forever because there was no contract or terms or anything. This is the risk we take by building our house on someone else's foundation.
- WoodenChair 2y agoThe gist I got from my communications with them 10 years ago was that they were encouraging me to finish it. I agree with you there was no expectation of it being free forever. I never said there was. What was unreasonable was the 4-days notice that it was coming to an end. That's just not enough time.
- openasocket 2y agoDepending on what kind of approvals they gave him 10 years ago, it MIGHT be possible that doing this violates a contract. It sounds like they had some kind of understanding when they gave him access that he had some sort of informal approval. Even if nothing was signed, that still forms a contract. Even if there was a formal contract or terms of service (TOS) agreement, there are certain restrictions around when and how a company can change their TOS. In particular, there's often requirements about how much advance notice has to be given if the terms of service change. It sounds like the monetary stakes are pretty small, but depending on the author's desire, it might be worth doing some research and potentially going to small claims court and claiming damages for those customers that requested refunds.
- WoodenChair 2y ago> It sounds like the monetary stakes are pretty small, but depending on the author's desire, it might be worth doing some research and potentially going to small claims court and claiming damages for those customers that requested refunds. Yes, the monetary stakes are too small for it to be worth it for me to pursue. I could probably dig up some old emails from 10+ years ago but it just wouldn't be worth it. Exposing this kind of bad behavior (4-days notice!) is enough.
- Aurornis 2y ago> Depending on what kind of approvals they gave him 10 years ago, it MIGHT be possible that doing this violates a contract. What contract? He never entered into a contract or even exchanged consideration with Yelp for the API as far as I can tell. Getting a green light via e-mail to use a free service is not a binding contract and does not come with any obligations.
- openasocket 2y agoIt sounds like he requested API access in order to make a native Mac application for Yelp. The specifics matter a lot here, but “if you develop a native Mac application for Yelp, we’ll give you free API access” sounds a lot like consideration. That could be completely false based on exactly how that went down, of course.
- drra 2y agoSeen this story play out so many times. I audited a company years ago that claimed to have excellent, personal almost, relationship with Google and all needed paperwork to use their platform as a core of their business. They went bust 6 months after because of "unexpected" change of Google's product strategy. Real lesson here is to avoid single points of failure, regardless if it's API, people or partners. Ask yourself a question if there's a single entity that can kill your business and remove that reliance.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoIt's so sad that we're at such a devoid barren state. There was so much hype & excitement in web2 age, about APIs & intertwingularity. Humanity was going to keep improving & iterating & crafting ever neater ideas. Now it's all bureaucracy & lawyers arrayed to defend the cloud-keeps, moats & walls. The user & agency of the world has been steady dimished, eroded away by ever advancing legal IP Protectionism.
- fencepost 2y agoIf you're depending on the continued existence of any Google product beyond GMail, Google Cloud and advertising you should really consider fallback positions. The existence of Youtube is also guaranteed, but the existence of any particular API or service that you might depend on? Not so much. Hell they'd probably consider killing GMail if they didn't need the accounts to tie advertising impressions to individuals.
- jowea 2y agoNot even search makes the cut?
- autoexec 2y agoSearch is already dying. Google doesn't need it.
- StressedDev 2y ago
- danjl 2y agoSurely nothing like this will happen to the folks that are using LLMs at the core of their app. /s
- physhster 2y agoI think the general lack of willingness to help in Big Tech is very problematic. You can almost never get through those thick-skulled reps that email you out of the blue...
- kmeisthax 2y agoThe problem is that by having a thick-skulled rep walk in and send a few e-mails, Yelp has already lost more money on API customer acquisition than the app developer was willing to pay. That's why these APIs had free tiers: they covered these kinds of micro-usages that would be far too cheap for a sales rep to cover. The reason why those free tiers went away is that AI came along. Not so much that the AI scrapers were abusing Yelp free tier[0], but that they could. And once companies realized how much money was floating around in selling data access, non-abusive free tier users went from "a cool goodwill gesture" to "freeloading parasites". David Kopec and Restauraunts got steamrolled in a case of technological gentrification. If you're selling data access for $TOO_CHEAP_TO_METER/call to a random indie, Apple, Google, and/or Microsoft will use that as a comparable for why Yelp should charge peanuts. Or they'll just acquihire him. They need him and his app to go away because he is inconvenient to the long-term valuation plan of Yelp, an old guard Web 2.0 business that never quite became sovereign. [0] Though, to be clear, AI scrapers are absolutely abusive in general.
- Aurornis 2y ago> You can almost never get through those thick-skulled reps that email you out of the blue... He did get through to the sales rep. The responses are directly in the article. The sales rep responded within hours and showed him how to sign up for the free trial option to extend the free usage period longer while he decided. What more would you want the rep to do?
- WoodenChair 2y ago> He did get through to the sales rep. The responses are directly in the article. The sales rep responded within hours and showed him how to sign up for the free trial option to extend the free usage period longer while he decided. > What more would you want the rep to do? Not send a threatening, inaccurate email with a 4-day (1 business day Friday->Monday) deadline in the first place? Also for the record, this was not a sales manager. This was someone in "growth" that sent the email. I guess maybe that just means "sales."
- umvi 2y agoProbably what happened was 1 support rep helped you out but did it through some undocumented backdoor to unblock you and not a formal contract. Later a completely unrelated set of employees are tasked with figuring out who the biggest API users are and to either cut them loose or get them to start paying.
- WoodenChair 2y agoYes, this was surely somewhat tied to employee turnover and poor record keeping. But I was almost certainly not one of the "biggest API users." The thing is, regardless of the turnover or situation, 4-days (actually 1-business day Friday->Monday) is not a reasonable timeframe to threaten to shutoff someone's API key who hasn't violated any terms of service. They have the right to do it, but it doesn't make you want to work with them in the future.
- umvi 2y agoIndeed, 4 days does seem too aggressive. You are probably a victim of automation: for (apiKey in apiKeys) if (userShouldPay(apiKey)) sendCanned4DayWarningEmail(apiKey);
- joelfried 2y agoThere's yellow squiggly underneath userShouldPay(apiKey) that reads: userShouldPay(apiKey) always evaluates to True.
- vzaliva 2y agoDrama aside, the guy signed up for the free Yelp API 10 years ago, which has since been discontinued. He was offered the option to switch to a paid API, which he chose not to consider. Yes, Yelp was a bit clumsy in handling this, but discontinuing the free API after 10 years is totally within their rights. The developer didn't even bother getting their pricing proposal, which might have been totally reasonable (or not), considering his app is paid.
- WoodenChair 2y agoI guess you didn't read my blog post because I addressed everything you wrote. The issue is not that it went paid, it's the 4-days notice. They are perfectly in their right to start charging for their API, they just can't give us 4-days notice. Well they can do whatever timeframe they want of course. And I can write about how rude it is. 4-days (really 1-business day in the original email Friday->Monday) is not a reasonable timeframe within which to threaten to cutoff an app with real users.
- vzaliva 2y agoJust killing your app is an emotional, not a rational, decision. You have a human responding to your emails, so here's a business way to handle this situation: Dear Yelp, Your decision to discontinue the free API was unexpected, and it’s difficult for me to switch to the new one within the given very short 4-day timeframe. Not only is this not enough time to estimate how your new API pricing will affect my business model, but it also requires some engineering work to switch my app to the new API. Given my 10-year history of working with Yelp, I would appreciate it if you could send me your new pricing proposal ASAP and also give me some time to consider it. If accepted, I would need additional time to implement it. Thank you.
- WoodenChair 2y agoIt's just not worth it. I have a full-time job and many other projects and apps I am supporting. I don't want to work with a company that provides long-term API users 4-days notice about a major change and threatens to cut you off in that time period. As you saw in the blog post I did write back to them and did not get any kind of response indicating flexibility (did you read my whole post?). Also, the money is very very low stakes. This app sells dozens of copies a year. Not hundreds or thousands. It's just not worth it financially. It sold 467 copies over 10 years. People who used it loved it, but it's not a money maker.
- oniony 2y agoHave you considered building your own restaurant database? You could add features to the app to allow users to submit and update entries.
- purec 2y agoI got the same email. Despite my hobby project (a random food picker) having been broken and not used for years (because of yelp API updates), they also told me my usage was higher than other developers... The email also arrived in my spam folder, so I was lucky to even see it. Once I got back to them they did increase the cutoff by a few days but it has since been stopped. Their new prices seemed insane to me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 2y ago> Their new prices seemed insane to me. I call this the "going out of business sale".
- Mistletoe 2y agoThe death spiral. https://steveshuconsulting.com/2006/03/the_pricing_dea/ https://steveshuconsulting.com/2006/03/the_pricing_dea/
- bornfreddy 2y agoThank you for the link, nicely explained!
- austin-cheney 2y agoInteresting and an excellent read. The death spiral at Travelocity (pre-Expedia acquisition) worked differently and was partially self-induced. Some background is required first. Travelocity was the first online travel agency (OTA). I believe they started around 1996. Through most of its life at that point all, I mean 95%+, of its success came from only two factors: best marketing in industry and growth of the internet. This is severely problematic because marketing only gets you so far in business. Conversely Expedia had really shitty marketing in comparison and yet came to dominate the industry because they were extremely aggressive at growing their supplier relations. You cannot EVER rely on growth of media adoption, like mom and pop coming online, because once that stops you have no fuel left in the tank. Reliance on growth of a media platform is like a gravy train that you did nothing to build and returns amazing wealth if you are in the right place at the right time, but once it stagnates its like your train derails and everybody dies. That is because everybody expects growth to continue, except you did nothing to earn the growth and now have no answers and nothing to show for it. This was around later 2008 when I joined the company and became unavoidably obvious to everybody over the next year. So, at that point what do you do? You competitors are far out pacing you by ignoring fun stuff, marketing, technology, and all the other bullshit that technology people look to. Instead they are focusing on core business principles and eating your golden goose while laughing at you. So, what do you do? In the case of Travelocity all the executives leave. New executives come into trying to figure out what to do. Like every great web business they focus more aggressively on marketing and advertising. This was Travelocity's death spiral. You have to understand that people DO NOT like advertisements. Really, I know its surprising, but when your site becomes littered with advertisements everywhere and all kinds of hidden telemetry people will leave and never come back. Your wonderful palace has become a trailer park. The business loves advertising. Revenue from advertisements is immediate. That is really significant. In e-commerce there is a massive lag between each stage of profit, revenue, and sales because you have to account for the cost of operations, sales, and inventory. The more expensive the product the longer the lag and that lag really complicates projections. So advertisements are like cocaine, because they immediately return profit that requires no effort while rotting your health slowly until you are a hollow skeleton. To be fair they were doing amazing things with inventory and pricing that was vastly superior to what the competition was doing after the leadership turn over. This was too little too late though. These innovations could have saved the business provided more time and the same level of discipline, but not when you are already in a death spiral. My learning from this is that a business that earns profit from selling something directly should not fuck up conversion or go out of its way to make customers hate them. When I put that way it sounds obvious, but web business get that wrong all the time because they get distracted by shiny things.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoHang on, they didn't give his app 4 days - they gave him 4 days to respond with some screenshots, and if he didn't respond, they would shut down his access. They didn't say they'll shut it down in 4 days regardless. I mean, don't take this as me defending Yelp - they're scumbags, and deserve any hate coming their way - but I don't think that the headline is an accurate description of what happened.
- WoodenChair 2y agoI did respond with the required information and they still shut down my access (10-days post though, not 4-days in the end). But regardless, no, I don't think sending you a request on a Friday for information due on a Monday or shutting down all of your access is reasonable. As I mentioned in my post, what if I had been on vacation? 1-business day or shut you down is just not a reasonable time frame to make anyone want to work with you in the future.
- pino82 2y ago[flagged]
- pavel_lishin 2y agoThat's a very fair point.
- suzzer99 2y agoYahoo used to have a decent restaurants API. I assume that's dead now.
- annexrichmond 2y agoIf I knew about this app before, I would've definitely bought it! The Yelp site and app are incredibly slow and tedious to use
- WoodenChair 2y agoThank you. Yup that was the main thing people liked about it. It was really fast and had no ads.
- iamleppert 2y agoWhen will people realize that using any big tech company API is a recipe for disaster? These companies, and their revolving door of employees, could care less about you, your app, or your users.
- sadcodemonkey 2y agoFor a site that caters to a startup and entrepreneurial crowd, it's hilarious the number of comments here that amount to "tough cookies, bud" and "Yelp can do whatever they want, and because they can, you should just shut up." They miss the spirit of this blog post entirely, which is to point out the overt hostility to and powerlessness of API users. That should be concerning to anyone working on projects that use APIs, which is, um... almost everyone, these days.
- WoodenChair 2y agoThanks—yeah I actually think they mostly just didn't read the whole post since I addressed this in detail in the last two bold sections "Development Ends" and "Lessons Learned."
- Veuxdo 2y ago> That should be concerning to anyone working on projects that use APIs Well, free APIs anyway. If you are paying for API access, you hopefully have a contract which gives you power.
- dual_dingo 2y agoEven if you pay, most likely you have a contract that effectively gives you close to no power because it's full of conditions favoring the service provider and trying to use the little power you have will be expensive because laywers and courts get involved.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 2y ago> which is to point out the overt hostility to and powerlessness of API users. That should be concerning to anyone working on projects that use APIs, which is, um... almost everyone, these days. Not everyone. Business that build on top of other company's APIs will arrange contracts with their API providers. Those contracts generally include warning periods for changes or discontinuation and penalties for early termination. The key here is that it was a free API with no contract or guarantees. Four days is short notice and frustrating, but it wouldn't have really changed the trajectory of his business if they had given him 180 days. If he didn't intend to pay for the API, he couldn't really sell an app that was going to stop working in a few months. So I know we're supposed to be angry about the 4 days thing. It's not good, obviously. However, I don't think it actually changes the situation at all if he wasn't going to sign up anyway.
- kelnos 2y ago> if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you are at their whim More than that, if you aren't paying for use of that third-party API, the people who run it will not care about you, and will think nothing of shutting you down. I think Yelp handled this poorly, and Restaurants was probably a net positive for their business -- a positive that they were getting for near-zero cost. It's a shame that companies are so short-sighted like this. But ultimately if you build on top of someone else's platform, with no backups and no alternatives, it's not really truly your app.
- travisgriggs 2y agoControl your own future, or you’ll have no future.
- jdenning 2y agoThis really sucks for OP, but my first thought on seeing yelp was: "People still use yelp? I thought it was widely known that they suppress bad reviews for money, and suppress good reviews if you don't pay." Yelp's path to monetization has always been kind of scummy IMO.
- autoexec 2y ago> "People still use yelp? I thought it was widely known that they suppress bad reviews for money, and suppress good reviews if you don't pay." A judge said that it wasn't extortion for yelp to hide good reviews until a company pays yelp, and that it wasn't extortion for yelp to remove bad reviews for companies that do pay them money though so I guess we're supposed to act like that's acceptable behavior and that their reviews can be considered trustworthy
- grishka 2y agoThat's when you take matters into your own hands and extract the API key out of one of their official apps. At least that's what I would've done. Though I'm not sure how legal that would've been if done in a paid app. It feels like a serious difference between just providing a better UX for someone else's service through adversarial interoperability for free, and profiting off of it.
- gukov 2y agoI’m actually surprised the API access lasted for so long. The person that provisioned it is probably long gone from Yelp. Similarly, the company’s values and priorities have changed as well. Also, I’m guessing this new API pricing policy is they way of combating data scraping to train AI.
- ratg13 2y agoIf you work for a company and decide that people using 100 API calls per day, hurts your company more than helps it.. then most likely you are either unqualified for making these decisions, or the service in question was built poorly from the start. There is little room to blame behavior like this on bad actors and not bad decision making. 10s of thousands of companies have managed to figure out combatting API abuse without shooting themselves in the foot.
- creesch 2y ago> If you work for a company and decide that people using 100 API calls per day, hurts your company more than helps it.. then most likely you are either unqualified for making these decisions You are entirely right, yet I see this train of thought happen so very often in different companies. Some of these people are a bit saner than others and actually do listen to others explaining why it is an idiotic train of thought. Others really are just see numbers in isolation and somehow refuse to look at them in context.
- sethammons 2y agoHow much money should yelp spend to help Restaurants continue to work?
- al_borland 2y agoWas this a move to try and get some profit from AI companies trying to train on their data? With the API providing limited results, I’d think it would be of limited use. I always found Apple’s use of it in Maps frustrating, because seeing POI details basically required I also have Yelp installed. If this move was AI driven, like with Reddit and others, I’m starting to dislike AI more and more… at least the rent seeking end of it, which seems to be slowing killing the open internet.
- binkHN 2y agoReminds me of something Reddit did just recently... I think when the AI scraping funding models go away, all these APIs will magically open up again.
- shawn-butler 2y agoI have seen many notices like this in the past few months. My guess is anbody of signficant size whose reason for existing includes curating user-generated content is trying to ensure that gen-AI ingestors don’t swallow up their data through unpaid API access or scraping. (Maybe a podcast or article popular with CxO and IT directors on the topic??) Which they seemingly already have done anyway. Another unintended side-effect of the borderline illegal and generally immoral “AI” companies efforts to get as many data sets as possible.
- balls187 2y agoCurious how much money the app developer made, and how much they paid for Yelp API access.
- WoodenChair 2y agoI sold 467 copies over 10 years for less than $5 per copy. It's about $2000 in revenue. Surely not a good use of my time. But I liked the app and so did its few users. We should build things we want to use ourselves right? I think it was a much nicer and faster frontend to the Yelp restaurant directory than the Yelp website. Your other question about the cost is answered in the blog post and in several other comments I have left in this thread. In short, when I started the app 10 years ago there was no paid API (perhaps there was some kind of "enterprise" version but I'm not sure). The point of my post is how poorly they handled the transition from free->paid.
- balls187 2y ago467 users seems like it would not trigger abnormal API usage. Sounds like Yelp sent a form letter.
- WoodenChair 2y agoYes, definitely based on other people in this thread getting the same letter. It was an inaccurate and threatening form letter bizarrely sent from a personal email address of a Yelp employee with another personal email address CCed.
- kgeist 2y agoBut how was the API key stored? If it's stored inside the binary, without an intermediate server managed by OP, someone could've disassembled the binary and starting using the API key independently for their own gain, triggering abnormal usage. Say, one of our Windows products uses a web API for TTS, and we've built an intermediate web server which stores the key and manages rate limits per user so that there was no abuse (the app uses our own auth).
- Terretta 2y agoDollars to donut stores, what's likely going on with the switch to expensive API is this: https://business.yelp.com/products/yelp-ads/ https://business.yelp.com/products/yelp-ads/ Same as the Reddit stunt versus the Apollo app dev, except that his app had a big enough audience you'd think they'd have figured something out. Nope. The paid app meant money from users to the app dev instead of from advertisers to the site. What's strange is Reddit didn't seem to do the math on how little they should have charged the app dev for API access if all they wanted was to offset revenue from that user base. Perhaps the fear was much as with TV streaming: they know advertisers want audiences willing to pay, not only the audiences seeking free.
- diceduckmonk 2y agoWe need to move towards “zero trust” for APIs. SaaS can provide “open core” or better yet simply sell a hosted version of their fully open source code. If the provider fails to provide, you can fall back to self hosting. The API equivalent would be open sourcing the data. This is the OpenStreetMap model. If the API provider fails to provide, you can fallback to the underlying data.
- DaSHacka 2y agoThis was the hope behind the StackExchange data dumps, that the community at large could always take their contributions elsewhere if the service jumped the shark. Well, before the SE organization tried to kill the data exports off in an attempt to commercialize it towards AI companies, but thats a whole other issue.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoThat's asking too much. SaaS should give an option for you to export all your own data in a simple, parseable format (like JSON). That's about it. They don't owe anyone their source code, and they don't owe any ethically sourced data (such as employees researching and manually entering). API access needs better terms. Like guaranteed access for X years at $Y price with Z days notice if there's a change, where Z > 3 months or so.
- xvector 2y agoThis is just pure boneheadedness across the Yelp management chain, all the way down to the IC level. - IC should have recognized the site was driving traffic to Yelp and flagged to management. - Management should have realized that some API usage is beneficial to Yelp overall, and crafted a plan around this. Just pure insanity. If I were a VP I'd fire everyone involved for a lack of basic critical thinking skills.
- RajT88 2y agoWho could have predicted that a company with a scammy business model would have such shady behavior when it comes to changing API pricing models? /s
- mistercow 2y agoA hard lesson I learned after several times getting burned in my time long ago doing indie stuff is “never depend on a single company without a backup plan”. Sometimes this can be pretty difficult to even see. If you were a Mac shareware dev depending on VersionTracker and MacUpdate to drive downloads, with no actual marketing budget, you might not have noticed that you were implicitly relying on Apple not creating an App Store which would turn the entire ecosystem upside down. This is one of the reasons that it’s so tough to make a business work at a small scale. In some ways, you have more flexibility than a big company, but the lack of capital means that certain events that a larger company would shrug off can totally upend everything you’re doing.
- throwaway14356 2y agoi use to be that guy telling people not to put their eggs in other peoples basket. Some laughed at me for a decade, almost convincingly and then... Of course my stuff also breaks because you cant really do anything anymore without trusting anything even against better judgement. I think we will eventually get expensive quality terms of service for those who think it might be fun if things work forever, like html documents and megalithic structures.
- smukherjee19 2y agoSorry to hear how Yelp treated the OP... Given how many stories of greed and throwing people under the bus for money I hear nowadays, we might already be living in a dystopia.
- pino82 2y agoIt was never different. Just, with the advent of iPhone, FB, WhatsApp, Youtube, etc, a lot of people basically decided to ignore this fact of life. So good and for so long that they completely forgot it. They forgot it good enough that even their childs got no education in that regard. And every some days, someone gets a lesson. ;) Why should Yelp not throw you under the bus for money? The problem was that (impersonal) you stopped understanding basic mechanisms of human interaction. For no real reason.
- 2099miles 2y agoThat’s trash. I’ll delete yelp over that, bad customer or dev relations sucks.
- pino82 2y agoWhat is the precise meaning of 'dev relations' here? What is the actual relation? They haven't ordered him to dev sth.
- rsweeney21 2y agoIf building an app on a platform does not increase the networks effects of that platform, this will always be the outcome. Good platforms get more valuable with more apps: iOS, Windows, etc Bad platforms don't get better with more apps: reddit, netflix, twitter. So they always end up killing the API.
- fluoridation 2y agoThe difference, I think, is that the former are platforms to run applications while the latter are communication platforms. There used to be a time when the phone company could press charges if you connected your "app" (a tone-generating machine) to their "API" (the phone line) to "do things the official app didn't support" (place long distance calls for free). It will always be beneficial to someone who owns a communication channel to assume as much control of the pipe as possible. If Twitter could jack directly into your brain stem and refuse to work until you install its client on your wetware, it would.
- throwaway2037 2y agoThat was a long blog post to tell us that they are no longer entitled to valuable free API access. It was a mistake to think it would last. This story has been repeated so many times here. As soon as the author started making money (they conveniently excluded their sales revs), they should have negotiated a written contract for access for a fee. It could be cut of app revs or pure API charges. Also, I am sure some smart managers looked at all their free API giveaways and decided there we no longer useful to their business model.
- ndiddy 2y agoThe author disclosed his sales revenues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124971 . He sold 467 copies of the software after 10 years, for a total revenue of around $2000. He never exceeded 200 API calls per day. I don't think it would have been worth Yelp's time to negotiate for a percentage of that.
- pino82 2y agoYes, that's why they haven't. ;)
- jijji 2y agohave you thought about writing your own API instead of using the de facto API? it may involve screen scraping but it also will be a lot more reliable and there's no limits, especially when using proxies.... I've written thousands of tools that scrape websites and never used the apis for this reason, you can never trust the API, either because of the reliability, cost, limits imposed, etc... Nobody wants you pulling data from their site anyway, so you're back to scraping anyway, its better to start out there then to have to end up there years later for some other reason...
- petterroea 2y agoEnshittification is at an all time high, and API access is being tightened and monetized in response to many industry factors including "freeloading" AI trainers. Cory Doctorow is right, if you want to disrupt, or make any improvement to an existing large platform, adversarial interoperability(that is, reverse engineering) is the only way forward and has to be explicitly legalized in cases where it's a tool for progress. My previous statement is arrogant, as it assumes developers are entitled to take any data they want and profit from it. It also puts services in a situation where harmful crawling like what is performed by some new AI actors with no experience is an expected thing. This is of course wrong, but I want to argue that had Yelp and other actors not wanted such a future, they shouldn't have tightened free access to their proper APIs where they have the ability to set ground rules and have the ability to talk to their users. Big companies are amazingly bad at keeping track of things internally - a promise in an e-mail is easily forgotten 10 years later. But why should the user be punished for Yelps lack of control?
- EGreg 2y agoBuilding atop centralized platforms, you run this risk. In a decentralized environment, you’d be able to keep a fork running just as it was.
- caesil 2y agoMy son, it is time for you to embrace the good news of our lord and savior web scraping.
- worthless-trash 2y agoThe big takeaway here is to never rely on a third party, they will inevitibly fuck you over. Every business will eventually turn anything that they can into a profitable feature for them.
- ForOldHack 2y agoI wrote a review for a grocery store turned food service shovel basically said "this will be the first store that charges for air." Guess what? I use their bathroom every other day,for free. I think it's been months since I bought anything, and I help myself to utensils. Every customer will eventually turn anything they can use for free, into a profitable feature for themselves. There was a book called the 1 minute manager: it was followed by a book called the 59 second employee. Never rely on an unscupulus third party, or if a third party becomes unscrupulous... Hunt them down. I disliked Yelp, and held it in deep distain, then while working for a service company, Yelp called. "For a fee we can remove all negative reviews." This is the definition of ensh*tification. So... I told him I would get back to him. I called a few numbers at Yelp and was basically able to socially engineer a vast list of their revinue growth supervisors. I made a list of every business in that city and the next, and related my experence, and how worthless a Yelp review was. Almost all the business responded to poor reviews with a 'i bet you are a Yelp employee drumming up money for fake reviews.' after a few weeks, I gathered up a lot of these, and sent a three page letter of them in a package with 50 of the Yelp peoples's names in it. I let that stew for a few days, and then called the idiot back. He said "we don't care." They don't. They do not care in the least. Google, OAth, and Facebook do not either. Hurt them in their advertising review and then they will listen.
- raverbashing 2y ago> is that if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you are at their whim. Well, yes. I think people figured that out more than 10 years ago And business models can and do change And by checking the pricing page, Yelp's commercial API is $15 per 1000 API calls per month. Which sounds ok?
- WoodenChair 2y agoRight, they never answered my questions about the discrepancy between that and the pricing deck they specifically sent me for my app. See slide 3 with a $229 per month base price: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ84a17J/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cb_8laDpxZdfwJPtYBmibZgvLZ8... The economics of Restaurants actually mean it wouldn't be profitable either way though. That's how low the sales are. They're welcome to start charging for their API whatever they want, but they should give more than 4-days (Friday->Monday, 1 business day) notice.
- brandonbukovic 2y ago[dead]
- isolli 2y agoThis feels important: > The other thing this taught me is the danger of an up-front paid model for apps that depend on ongoing access to third-party services. If users were continually paying for the app, paying for Yelp’s APIs would not be as much of an issue. And I wouldn’t feel as guilty about the app being discontinued since if the fees were charged on a monthly basis, they would just end at the same time the app ceased to exist instead of facing an expectation upon purchase of “forever access.” On the other hand, how would you charge a monthly fee for an app that people are only willing to spend less than $5 for upfront? There are apps that I like and would like to purchase, but paying e.g. 24 euros per year feels like too much. So I stick with the free version...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sethammons 2y agoCould pivot to customer provided api keys :\
- knallfrosch 2y ago> But due to the way that the Mac App Store works we don’t have our customers’ email nor any way to directly refund them. > if you utilize a third-party API for the core of your app, you are at their whim. I think you might also want to revisit your relationship with Apple Incorporated.
- WoodenChair 2y agoYes, for sure. Some people explain it away as "well if you buy Wrangler jeans from Walmart and there's something wrong with them you ask Walmart for a refund." So if you buy X's app from Apple you ask Apple for a refund. That kind of makes sense. But if Wrangler does a recall, they have a way of getting that across to their customers.
- shever73 2y agoWe've been bitten by going the "free 3rd-party <x>" route so many times, so I sympathise with the problem here. Off-topic, but kudos to OP for still engaging with the threads. This certainly wasn't a dump and run post. They've probably spent more time answering questions here than they did developing the app!
- WoodenChair 2y agoAuthor here. I actually discovered something in their terms of use today while looking up something else that someone had asked me in this thread: "2. CHANGES Yelp reserves the right to modify the API Agreement at any time. If Yelp reasonably determines that a modification may materially and adversely impact You, Yelp will provide email notice to you using the email address you provided during registration no less than ten (10) days prior to the material adverse modification taking affect. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND TO ANY NEW OR MODIFIED TERMS, YOU MUST TERMINATE THE API AGREEMENT BY CEASING USE OF THE API WITHIN TEN (10) DAYS OF RECEIPT OF SUCH NOTICE." So, the 4-days would have violated their original notification terms of use anyway. I think they realized this after the fact of sending all of us the threatening emails and this is why they ultimately closed my API key after 10-days as described in my original post. Anyway, just an interesting aside that the poorly written, inaccurate original email that I shared in my original post was even inaccurate to their own policies.
- nashashmi 2y ago"YOU MUST TERMINATE" rather than be held to the original terms you initially signed up for ... because Yelp RESERVES the right. We have all now been reminded that RESERVED RIGHTS can and will be used against you maliciously. And if you want protection from such malice, there needs to be a RIGHTS of the USER clause. This should be handled and enforced by government statutes. (It is an amazing world we live in where rights of the user have to be expressed.)
- romwell 2y ago10 days. How very generous of them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ginko 2y agoIs Yelp even still relevant these days? At least where I am in Europe I find it incredibly outdated, showing restaurants that have closed a long long time ago and none of the new ones.
- WoodenChair 2y agoIt seems to be mostly a US phenomenon. As I pointed out in the post almost all of Restaurants sales were to the US. The directory is very up-to-date with active reviews everywhere that I've travelled in this country.
- EricE 2y agoDigital sharecropping. I don't know what the answer is, but it's sad to see it unfolding!
- pino82 2y agoI'd say, no you had no shared customers. Yelp had the customers, and you wrote some app that uses Yelp. For no real reason you assumed that you could be part of them (as with Facebook earlier). Sure you had some kind of informal permission at first. And then they revoked it. That's their right to do, right? Maybe you should not write Facebook or Yelp apps, if you are neither Facebook nor Yelp nor asked by them to write clients for their walled gardens. Or if you really want, set up an actual license agreement with them. Those networks are walled gardens and they don't want to cooperate with you that way. They are just not those kinds of shops which you can cuddle with. If you want to create something that has an own value, create something more than just another Faceyelptwitterddit frontend. The good thing: You took your lesson. Maybe this time it was sufficient to actually learn sth.
- WoodenChair 2y ago> I'd say, no you had no shared customers. Person pays for my app. That was a customer. Person who paid for my app also later uses the Yelp website via a link for a specific review from my app. Also a customer. Therefore shared customers. > Sure you had some kind of informal permission at first. I don't know why you would define it as informal. They had an official review process for deciding what apps to grant higher daily API limits. My app went through that review process 10 years ago including considering its functionality, screenshots, and I believe I even sent them a prototype back then. We had a few emails back and forth to confirm my intentions to only develop for the Mac and what I was building. I'm sure that got lost in the corporate shuffle over 10 years but I clearly had their permission to build the app and in fact given the relatively high API limit they gave (25000 per day versus the free at that time 10 years ago I think being 1000 per month), arguably blessing.
- WoodenChair 2y agoAuthor here—seems they noticed that people were unhappy. Just got this email from Yelp (August 1, 2024): > Earlier this month, we sent you an email about your Yelp Fusion API usage. That email gave developers until July 23rd to contact us if they want to continue using Yelp’s data for use in their app. We realize you might need more time and are extending your free access for an additional 90 days starting today. Your access should be available now. > We’re sorry for any inconvenience or frustration this abbreviated transition might have caused. Please respond to this email or contact us at api@yelp.com if you have any questions.
- krazydad 2y agoI got the same email regarding my hobby website "The Wheel of Lunch" (https://wheelof.com/lunch https://wheelof.com/lunch). The site makes no money and sends traffic to Yelp. The cheapest plan offered was $230 a month! I can't afford that. I have stopped calling the Yelp API for local listings and put up a notice on the site. It was fun while it lasted!
- WoodenChair 2y agoSorry to hear that. Remember your site from 15 years ago when I was an intern trying to figure out where to eat.