If your entire app relies on the api of a another company you should expect trouble. Not only can they cut you off at any point as has happened to statsaholic b

If your entire app relies on the api of a another company you should expect trouble. Not only can they cut you off at any point as has happened to statsaholic but you'll be less reliable. You'll be affected by your own downtime as well as the api providers. I saw this happen the other day when last.fm released a new beta that included flickr integration. At the exact time that they made the announcement the flickr search servers went down for a few hours. Luckily they'd designed the pages to degrade gracefully and still work without flickr being up. Luckily if your a small startup you can adapt quickly and find another way :)