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.
Why free support tiers should still get real answers
It is common enough to be almost unremarkable: a support system with a fast, thoughtful response path for paying customers and a slow, templated, barely-read queue for everyone else. The logic is straightforward from a resourcing perspective, paying customers generate the revenue that funds support staff, so it makes sense to prioritize their tickets. The result, though, is that a free tier user with a genuine, well-formed technical question gets a canned response, or no response at all, purely because of which pricing tier they happen to be on, regardless of how legitimate or how easy to answer the question actually was.
We think this creates a bad first impression at exactly the point where a first impression matters most. A developer testing an API for the first time, on the free tier, encountering a genuine problem, and getting a dismissive or absent response is learning something real about what support looks like after they start paying, not something separate from it. Free tier support quality is not a cost center disconnected from paid customer experience. It is a preview of it, and treating it as disposable sends exactly the wrong signal to the customers a company most wants to eventually convert.
This does not mean every ticket, regardless of tier, needs the same response time or the same depth of hands-on engineering attention. A large paying customer with a production incident reasonably gets faster and more direct attention than a general question from someone testing on the free allowance. The distinction we care about is between prioritization, which is a reasonable operational reality, and dismissal, which is treating a question as not worth a real answer at all because of the account it came from.
Part of why this matters more for us specifically is that our free tier is meant to be a genuine evaluation path, not a token gesture: 2,500 requests a day, enough to build and test a real integration. If someone hits a real, confusing problem while doing exactly that evaluation, and the support response they get is a form letter, the free tier has failed at its actual purpose, which is to let someone find out honestly whether the product works for them. A support interaction that answers nothing is part of that evaluation too, whether or not it was meant to be.
We do not think this requires unlimited support staff time devoted equally to every account regardless of scale, which would not be sustainable. It requires deciding that a real question deserves a real answer, proportionate to its complexity, regardless of which tier asked it. A templated non-answer costs almost nothing to send and communicates almost exactly the wrong thing: that the question, and the person asking it, were not worth the time.