The 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 deve

The 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.