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 "unlimited" plans that quietly aren't
The word unlimited shows up on a lot of API pricing pages, and it rarely means what it says. Scroll to the fine print of some unlimited plans and you find a fair use policy, a soft cap, or a clause reserving the right to throttle an account that uses the plan more than the provider expected. That is not unlimited. That is a limit the provider has not told you the number of yet.
This matters because unlimited is supposed to be the plan you buy specifically to stop worrying about limits. If a customer signs up for an unlimited tier and then gets a support email asking them to reduce usage, the word has failed at the one job it had. It is not a technical failure. It is a wording problem, and wording problems in pricing pages cost trust, not just money.
Our Unlimited key costs €50 a month and has no request cap. We do not reserve a right to throttle it based on a number we have not published, because publishing that number is the entire point of calling something unlimited. If we ever needed a genuine technical safeguard against abuse, we would say so plainly and give you the number, not bury a soft cap behind a word that promises the opposite.
Some of this comes down to how infrastructure actually behaves. A request to look up a time zone or resolve an IP address costs very little in compute, and that cost does not change based on how many other unlimited customers exist that month. A plan built on a real per-request cost can genuinely support no cap, because the provider is not trying to average a fixed monthly fee against unpredictable usage from a shared pool. A plan that quietly depends on most unlimited customers using far less than they are entitled to cannot survive contact with a customer who actually uses it heavily, and that is exactly the customer the word unlimited is supposed to serve.
There is also a quota transparency angle here. Every response from My Geocode carries headers showing your quota limit, what you have used, and what is left, along with your remaining credits. If a term like unlimited were doing anything other than what it says, those headers would eventually show it, because a throttled request looks different from a normal one. We would rather the headers just keep confirming the plain meaning of the word.
None of this is a complaint about caps themselves. A provider that offers a plan with a clearly stated ceiling, say a fixed number of requests a month for a fixed price, is being honest, and a customer can plan around that number. The problem is with plans that borrow the word unlimited for its marketing weight and then walk it back operationally. Call it a large plan. Call it a high tier. Just do not call it unlimited unless a customer can run it as hard as their product needs and never hear otherwise.