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> One thing I want to be crystal clear about here is that the $3.50 fee is no way an attempt to monetise something I always wanted to provide for free. If this was true, then all revenue made from those 3.5 would get donated to a worthy cause, not donated into Troy's own pocket. I am not saying that he shouldn't monetise it, but please let's be honest about it. > The point is that the $3.50 number is pretty much bang on the mark for the cost of providing the service. The cost of the service is the actual final bill which has to be paid for this service, taken into account all the free credits Troy gets as a Microsoft Regional Director, free credits for hugely advertising Azure at every occasion, free credits from Cloudflare for constantly advertising for them, the tax which he doesn't pay as a registered company, etc. divided by the actual amount of customers who use the API. This cost could be much more, or significantly less than $3.5. If Troy wanted to be more transparent then he could, but given that he is very secretive and very selective about the bits of information he shares around all of this, my guess is the cost is much less than what Tory makes everyone believe. Overall I don't think it is ethical to monetise a service which is built on stolen data. There is a good chance that Troy holds data on me, my parents, my sister, wife and lots of other people who's data have been breached over the years and have no idea who Troy is, what the heck HIBP is or even know how to contest or request from Troy to remove their data from his service, yet it's being used for monetisation. There was never a consent from anyone to hord our data. It's stolen, and only because stolen data is easily discoverable on the internet doesn't make it alright to actively search, store and monetise that data. It's still stolen and should get deleted from everywhere. |