[elamje]

I wonder if this actually has more to do with trying to sell HIBP, than abuse. He just announced that he was selling HIBP a month or two ago. Presumably, if he can get people to pay a nominal fee now for access to the api, it makes HIBP much more valuable to a potential acquirer. If you can prove people are willing to pay $.01/month for a subscription, you can assume(as a potential acquirer) that they would pay $.02/month in the future. Much harder to sell something that is completely free because of the risk that monetization completely fails later.

In previous blog posts he mentions that he gets 99.x% cache hits on Cloudflare, then also has a cache on his Azure service. He is sponsored by Cloudflare and Microsoft and doesn’t pay for the service unless something has changed since a few months ago. If that is still true, I don’t fully buy that he is actually spending money on Microsoft api hits as the post claims.

But, I like Troy and HIBP, so maybe I’m just too much of a skeptic :-)