> Slap a 429 [...] will soon learn what they're doing wrong.

Oh how I wish this was true. We have customers sending 10-100s requests per second and they will complain if even just one gets 429. As in, they escalate to their enterprise account rep. I always tell them to buy the customer a "error handling for dummies" book but they never learn.

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alias_neo 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Another commenter said essentially the same thing, I sympathise, it's painful when the "customer" can't understand something clearly telling them they're doing it wrong.

I don't have an answer, but I wonder, for the sake of protecting your own org, is some sort of "abuse" policy the only approach; as in, deal with the human problem, be clear with them in writing somewhere that if they're seeing response X or Y (429 etc) that they're essentially abusing the API and need to behave.

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bombcar 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The only thing that reliably works is to push the cost to the customer - so they can do whatever insanity they want, and they get charged accordingly.

And we’ve had cases where we had “fuckoff” charges in contracts (think $1 per API call after X thousand calls a day) and the customer just gladly pays tens of thousands of dollars and thanks us for fixing their problem.

The money is nice but sometimes you just want to shake them and say “look we have notifications you don’t need to poll the endpoint ten times a second, fuck it give us the code and we’ll fix it …”

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alias_neo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I bet if the costs were an order of magnitude larger, they'd think the costs were as unreasonable as we think their huge number of requests are.

There's just no winning sometimes sigh.

	▲	bombcar 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's hard to switch them over, but if you have it in the beginning, you boil the frog.

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alluro2 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Heh, exactly my other reply - I feel for you, friend!

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raverbashing 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes

Well, if this is a supported (as in $) account, sure enough, have the API rate limits published and tell them in the most polite way to RTFM