The trouble with API keys that never expire
A key issued years ago, never rotated, and still valid today is not a convenience. It is a liability nobody has actually looked at in years.
The trouble with data that's accurate on launch day only
A dataset is easiest to be proud of on the day it launches. It has been checked, cleaned, and validated against whatever sources were available at the time, and the announcement can honestly claim strong coverage and accuracy, because at that specific moment, it earned the claim. The trouble is that almost nothing about geography stays fixed for long. Administrative boundaries shift. Postal authorities redraw or reissue codes. Governments amend daylight saving rules, sometimes with very little notice. A dataset that was accurate on launch day and has not been actively maintained since is not the same dataset anymore, even though it may still be marketed with the same confidence.
The IANA time zone database is a useful example of how this actually gets handled well: it exists specifically because time zone rules keep changing, and it gets updated as those changes happen, by people whose job is tracking exactly that kind of shift. A geocoding or location API that draws on a source like this and keeps pulling updates from it is doing something meaningfully different from a provider that built a one-time snapshot years ago and has been serving it, lightly patched, ever since.
We think this distinction, ongoing maintenance versus a one-time build, deserves more attention than it usually gets in how location data products are marketed. A launch announcement can claim broad country coverage and it will be true. What it cannot promise, on its own, is that the coverage stays true two years later, after boundary changes, postal reorganizations, and time zone rule amendments that happened quietly in the meantime, with no reason for a customer to know to check.
This is part of why we treat time zone, elevation, and IP data as the parts of our product we describe most concretely, since these are areas where the underlying reference data, the kind of source the IANA database represents for time zones, gets maintained on an ongoing basis by design, not by a provider's internal update schedule alone. It is also why we are careful about overstating forward geocoding, reverse geocoding, and autocomplete as fully finished with verified accuracy: address data specifically has enormous regional variability in how well it gets maintained, and a confident-sounding claim about it deserves more scrutiny than the claim itself usually invites.
A dataset's age is not a defect by itself. A well-maintained dataset from five years ago that has been kept current is more trustworthy than a fresh one that will not be revisited again until the next redesign. What matters is whether a provider treats data maintenance as a continuous obligation or a one-time project that was finished when the marketing page went live. The honest way to judge that is not the launch announcement. It is what a provider does, quietly, in the years after it.