[jot]

That’s right. On our standard self-service plans we automatically charge a better rate as volume increases. You only pay the difference between tiers as you move through them.

It’s rare that anyone makes that kind of mistake. It probably helps that our rate limits are relatively low compared to other APIs and we email you when you get close to stepping up a tier. If you did make such a mistake we would, like all good dev tools, work with you to resolve. If it happened a lot we might introduce some additional controls.

We’ve been in this business for over 12 years and currently have over 700 customers so we’re fairly confident we have the balance right.

[ALittleLight]

I'm not a customer, so don't take what I say too seriously, but to me it seems like you are unilaterally making a purchasing decision on my behalf. That is, I agreed to pay you 50 dollars a month and you are deciding I should pay 100 (or more) - to "upgrade" my service. My intuition is that this is probably not legal, and, if I were a customer, I would not pay for a charge that I didn't explicitly agree to - if you tried to charge me I would reject it at the credit card level.

If I sign up for a service to pay X and get Y, then I expect to pay X and get Y - even if my automated tools request more than Y - they should be rejected with a failure message (e.g. "quota limit exceeded").