[danpalmer]

Yeah this doesn't seem to be in line with the expected use or target market of Drive. It sounds like your tool is probably creating all the files acting as one service account, and therefore hitting the limit if it is indeed per user.

I think the rule of thumb I would use is that if you're creating the files in an automated way, and then accessing them outside of Drive interfaces, in all cases, then it's probably a better fit for a web app with cloud storage backend. Google Cloud Storage or S3 would work well for this.