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 we built a keyless tier instead of a longer trial
A trial has a clock built into it. Fourteen days, thirty days, however long, and then it stops or it asks for a credit card. That clock is not there because your evaluation takes exactly that long. It is there because the provider wants to convert curiosity into billing before the curiosity fades. Most developers know this, which is why a countdown timer on a signup page reads as pressure rather than generosity.
We do not run a trial. My Geocode gives 2,500 requests a day from any address, with no key and no account required, and it does not expire. You can test an integration this week, come back in three months to test another one, and the same allowance is there both times. A key is free too and gets its own 2,500 requests a day, counted per network, so signing up does not shrink what you already had.
The reasoning is simple: evaluation and production use are not the same activity, and they should not share a clock. A trial forces you to decide, within an arbitrary window, whether a product is good enough to pay for, often before your own project has reached the point where it needs meaningful volume. A standing free tier lets the decision happen on your schedule. You upgrade when your usage actually crosses the free allowance, not when a timer says your grace period is over.
This also changes what a signup page is for. A time-limited trial exists to create urgency around a purchase decision. A keyless tier exists to let you find out whether the data is good and the response shape fits your code, with nothing at stake yet. Those are different jobs, and we think the second one is the honest version of what a "try before you buy" offer is supposed to do.
There is a cost to us in doing it this way. Some fraction of keyless traffic will never convert to a paying account, and a trial with a harder deadline would probably convert a few more of those people through simple pressure. We would rather earn the upgrade because prepaid credit at €0.0001 a request or an Unlimited key at €50 a month is worth it once you are past 2,500 requests a day, not because a countdown made you decide before you were ready.
None of this means the free tier is meant to run a business on indefinitely. It is generous enough to build and test against, not to replace a paid plan for a product with real traffic. But the line between testing and production should be a usage threshold you cross naturally, not a date on a calendar that has nothing to do with your project's actual timeline.