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 free tier is actually for
A free tier gets designed for one of two very different reasons, and it is usually obvious after a few minutes of use which one a given provider chose. One version exists to let a developer genuinely evaluate a product: enough volume to build a real integration, run it against real data, and decide whether it is worth paying for. The other version exists to create a taste just large enough to generate interest and just small enough to force an upgrade decision almost immediately, functioning less like an evaluation tool and more like the first page of a pitch.
Ours is meant to be the first kind. 2,500 requests a day from any address, no key needed, and another 2,500 a day once you add a key, counted per network and shared between keyless and keyed use from that network. That is enough to build and test a real integration, not a token amount that runs out during the first afternoon of trying the API and leaves you making a purchase decision before you have learned anything.
The distinction matters because a free tier sized as bait produces a specific, bad kind of decision-making. A developer who runs out of free requests in the first hour is not deciding to upgrade because the product proved its value. They are deciding whether to keep spending time on an evaluation that got cut short, often before they even reached the parts of the integration that would reveal whether the data quality and response shape genuinely fit their use case. That is not a real evaluation. It is a truncated one, dressed up as a free trial.
A free tier sized for genuine evaluation costs the provider more, in the direct sense that some meaningful fraction of that usage will never convert into revenue. We think that cost buys something worth having: a customer who upgrades because they actually tested the product and it worked, not because a countdown or a request cap forced the decision before the testing was finished. The conversion that follows from real evaluation tends to be a more durable one, because it is based on the product rather than on running out of runway to keep evaluating it.
There is a second, quieter purpose a generous free tier serves: it covers small, permanent, low-volume use cases without ever requiring a paid account at all. A personal project, a small nonprofit tool, a student assignment, none of these need to become a customer just to keep working within a reasonable daily allowance. A free tier that only exists to expire is not built to serve that use case. Ours is, on purpose, because not every legitimate use of an API needs to become a line item on someone's monthly budget.