@maldr0id

Who could have guessed that if you charge absurd amounts of money for API access, people would switch to web scraping, and if you then disable the site for non logged-in users to stop web scraping, the scrapers would start registering new accounts and use those for scraping?

This is just peak capitalism - the infrastructure for enforcing the rate limiting likely costs more resources than the web scraping or free API access did in the first place.