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 "enterprise-grade" usually means in this industry
"Enterprise-grade" is one of those labels that sounds like a technical claim and is usually a commercial one. It rarely specifies a particular uptime guarantee, a particular support response time, or a particular capacity commitment that a customer could hold the provider to. What it reliably signals is that the actual price, and often the actual limits, are not on the pricing page at all. They are behind a form that leads to a sales call, where the number you get depends on how the conversation goes rather than on a rate published for everyone to see.
We think this pattern deserves more skepticism than it usually gets. A pricing page that lists a self-serve tier clearly and then routes anything larger to "contact sales" is not necessarily hiding something sinister, but it is choosing opacity at exactly the point where a customer has the most at stake: a large-scale commitment. The customers with the most reason to need a clear, comparable number are the ones being asked to negotiate for it individually instead.
My Geocode has one pricing structure regardless of scale: 2,500 free requests a day from any address, prepaid credit at €0.0001 per request beyond that, or a flat €50 a month for an Unlimited key. There is no separate enterprise tier with a different, undisclosed rate for larger customers, because we do not think usage volume by itself justifies a different price per request. The cost of serving a lookup does not change based on how large the customer sending it happens to be.
Part of the appeal of an "enterprise-grade" sales-gated tier, from a provider's perspective, is that it allows charging different customers different amounts for the same service based on what each one is willing to pay, rather than what the service actually costs to provide. That is a defensible business strategy in plenty of industries. We do not think it fits well with infrastructure that is supposed to be predictable and boring, the two qualities you actually want from something your product depends on every time a request goes out.
None of this means every large customer needs to be treated identically to a hobbyist project. A big user of Unlimited keys or heavy prepaid credit is a bigger, more important relationship for us than a small keyless integration, and that can reasonably come with more direct support attention. What it should not come with is a different published rate per request, arrived at through negotiation rather than through a formula anyone could calculate on their own. If enterprise-grade is going to mean anything specific, it should describe a real technical or support commitment, not act as a polite label for a price that only exists after a phone call.