> For a business, blocking some of your paying customers isn't acceptable.

That depends on your business and the costs you're incurring from the bots. It might be justifiable to lose 0.1% of your customers if it means saving server costs from serving useless bot traffic.

I suppose it would depend, yeah. I find having paying customers being blocked to be completely unacceptable. Not only is a bad customer experience, but they tend to be very vocal about it. Posting online, leaving bad reviews, etc.