[karlcoelho1]

You should have asked money from the manufacturer! They probably would've been a large enough company, that you could have specified your hosting expenses and they still would pay for it! Just to not have unhappy customers. Maybe this is unethical, but with '1TB of incoming requests', desperate times calls for desperate measures.

[rocky1138]

It's hardly unethical if his original intention was as he stated: to run a free API as a proof of concept.

It would only have been unethical if his intention was to sucker people into relying on it then switching to a pay-only system via extortion.

[tonyarkles]

That was my first thought too, but maybe it's because I've been doing contracting so long. My first answer would have been "Sure, I can do that... for a price."