[gloubibou]

Don't forget desktop and mobile applications. Most mapping and geocoding services do.

- I have to ship my API keys to end users. Someone could grab it and repurpose it - Rate limiting by API key penalizes one end customer for the other's misbehaving

I would love an API that is aware of the end user. Applies rate limiting on a user basis. Allows for anonymized user-based usage report. E.g. number of end users, average number of API calls by users, …

[freyfogle]

your comments generated a lot of discussion for us here, thanks. Our conclusion: if you build an app (mobile, desktop, whatever) that becomes popular and depends on a third party service, in our case a geocoder, it generates real costs for the thidd party service. So there are three potential groups who can pay the cost

a. the third party service provider can just provide service for free. We can't, at least not indefinitely.

b. the end consumer can somehow be billed by the third party service. Feels complicated, especially as the use of the service may be deep in the internals and behind the scenes of the app. The consumer may well have no idea it is being used

c. the application developer can pay. Either directly or via billing the end consumer.

Option c. feels like the only sustainable one. Happy to hear your thoughts on it though.

[gloubibou]

Option c is the way to go. Up to the app developer to see how to monetize the app.

Bonus points if the end user can be identified. E.g. if the app can pass an opaque token to the web service. Reporting / billing from the web service provider groups usage by token.