if you already have an api that exposes all the information that your parter who is willing to pay for an API key wants, then sure, that's perfect. but what if you don't have an API, or your API doesn't expose the information that crawlers are looking for? they want to crawl your website, they're willing to pay for the ability to crawl your website, but you don't want to build an API...

i'm sure the next step here will be a cloudflare product that sits in front of your website and blocks all bot traffic except for the bots that are verified to have paid for access. (or maybe that already exists?)