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 open data beats licensed data for most use cases
Licensed data has an obvious appeal: a single vendor controls it, curates it, and can be held contractually accountable for its quality. It also comes with a structural risk that is easy to underweight when a deal is first signed: the license is a relationship with one party, and that party can change the terms, raise the price, or restrict access in a future renewal in ways the original agreement never fully protected against. A dataset your product depends on can become more expensive, or less available, for reasons that have nothing to do with the data itself and everything to do with a negotiation you were not part of.
Open, community-maintained reference data does not eliminate risk, but it changes its shape in a way we think is generally healthier for a product built on top of it. The IANA time zone database is a clear example: it is maintained openly, tracked by contributors with a direct stake in its accuracy, and available to anyone building on top of it without a licensing negotiation standing between the data and the product. Country codes under ISO 3166-1, and subdivision codes under ISO 3166-2, work the same way, as widely adopted reference standards rather than something a single company controls access to.
Building on top of open reference standards where they exist, and reserving proprietary effort for the parts of the product that genuinely need it, like the matching logic and coverage work behind geocoding itself, lets us avoid the renegotiation risk that comes with sourcing something like time zone rules or country codes from a single exclusive vendor. Nobody can revoke our access to the IANA database or double its price at the next contract renewal, because there is no exclusive contract standing between it and anyone using it.
This does not mean open data is automatically higher quality than licensed data, or that licensing is always the wrong choice. Some data genuinely requires the kind of sustained, funded, centralized effort that only a commercial vendor can realistically provide, and paying for that is a reasonable trade when no open equivalent exists at comparable quality. The point is narrower: where a solid, actively maintained open standard already exists, building a proprietary, licensed alternative on top of the same underlying facts mostly just recreates vendor risk that did not need to exist in the first place.
We think this is a case where behind-the-scenes data sourcing decisions actually matter to a customer, even though they never see them directly. A product built on open reference data where it is available is less exposed to a single vendor's future decisions, which means the product itself is less likely to change underneath a customer for reasons that have nothing to do with anything the customer did.