Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Is there a reasonable model for commercial sites to survive if their APIs are free?
The obvious answer is "charge a reasonable price".
Many services like AccuWeather do that, including having a limited free tier for experimentation or niche applications.
The real problem though is that the value of the data isn't just the cost of storing and making it available - in many cases its strategic. This is why e.g. the Google Maps API gives you pre-rendered map tiles and curated results, but you don't get access to the raw data.