[cfcef]

You're being paranoid for several reasons. First, you will presumably be keeping the classifications you get from the API (if for no other reason than $2/1000 can really add up and why would you do that to yourself?). Second, Google has historically always had very generous end-of-life announcements. Third, there are already a number of competitors, including the trained CNNs Google has already released. Fourth, even if there were no competitors nor pre-trained models, deep learning is increasingly accessible and you could learn to imitate a past ImageNet-winning CNN in Torch/Theano/Tensflow/etc and train it within a few weeks. Fifth, paid Google services tend to hang around longer. Sixth, machine learning is a major part of Google and they are increasingly rolling it out to their services and may well be using this API themselves, making closing it not such a great idea.

So you're passing up what could be substantial benefits, Google isn't going to close it anytime soon, if they do you will have months of warning, and can easily replace it with a competitor or your own.

[jfoster]

That makes sense. Cheers!