The article has been updated to say "My biggest gripe with bit.ly is not their pricing, it's their policy of not letting users export their data and by that loc

The article has been updated to say "My biggest gripe with bit.ly is not their pricing, it's their policy of not letting users export their data and by that locking their users in." - so basically in addition to building his business around violating terms of service he couldn't be bothered to read he also never considered vendor lock-in. When choosing any technology or service one shouldn't expect there to always be an easy way to switch. Vendor lock-in is something that needs to be considered and investigated before deciding a technology or service. With the author's updated "biggest gripe" it sounds like he would consider it Oracle's fault if he built his business using OracleDB and then decided to switch to MongoDB. I never heard of Swayy before reading this article - but it did a lot more to convince me to never consider using it than convince me of anything "shady" on bit.ly's end.