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.
What a coupon code says about a company's pricing confidence
Search for almost any subscription software product and a discount code turns up somewhere: a blog post, a forum thread, an affiliate site, offering some percentage off that has apparently been valid for months or years. A coupon that never expires and is trivially easy to find is not really a coupon in the sense of a limited, genuine promotion. It is closer to a permanent second price list that exists specifically so the advertised price can stay artificially high for anyone who does not go looking for the workaround.
This pattern relies on a specific kind of customer behavior: enough people will pay the full listed price without searching for a discount that the inflated number remains worth publishing, while everyone who does search finds the real price and feels like they got a deal, when in fact they just found the price that was always closer to what the product should cost. Both groups are being sold the same product. One of them is paying more, purely because they did not know to look for a code.
We priced My Geocode at the number we think the product is actually worth, not a number designed to be discounted down to the real price through a code that circulates separately from the pricing page. €0.0001 per request, €50 a month for Unlimited, 2,500 free requests a day. Those are the numbers, not a starting point for negotiation through a coupon a customer has to go find somewhere else to get the price everyone else is actually paying.
A permanent, widely known discount code is also a strange signal about how a company thinks about its own customers: it assumes a meaningful share of them either will not notice the gap between the listed price and the real price, or will not bother to look for the code, and prices accordingly for that group specifically. We think this is a bad way to treat customers who are simply less inclined to search for a workaround before paying for something. The price on the page should be the price, for everyone, whether or not they thought to check a coupon site first.
None of this is an argument against occasional, genuine promotions with a real, limited window: a launch discount, a seasonal offer, something with an actual end date and a specific reason for existing. The difference between that and a permanently circulating code is the difference between a real event and a permanent, unofficial second price list. A pricing page confident in its own number does not need a workaround quietly available elsewhere to make that number bearable. It just needs the number to already be right.
We priced My Geocode at €0.0001 per request and €50 a month for Unlimited because those are the numbers we are willing to stand behind in public, to every customer, with no separate quieter number waiting to be discovered by whoever happens to search for one.