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 …”

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.