> why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else

I’m guessing that they did, and that that’s what this policy is.

If you’re talking about detecting account sharing/reselling, I’m guessing they have some heuristics, but they really don’t want the bad press from falsely accusing people of that stuff.

fair enough - DS probably ran through data and came up with 5% and some weekly cutoff as a good starting point until they have better measures in place

my point is that 5% still a large cohort and they happen to be your most excited/creative cohort. they might not all want to pay a surchage yet while everyone is discovering the use cases / patterns / etc

having said that, entirely possible burn rate math and urgency requires this approach