Since the service went live we've offered two main ways to access our API. As a registered user and an unregistered user. Meaning you could query our API with or without an API Key.

As is often the case with a service like this most users choose not to signup for an API Key. This is mostly due to third party software integrating our API and not requiring users to obtain an API Key. Secondary to this is developers that don't think they'll need more than 100 queries or the other features accessible by being registered.

But of course this presents a problem for our service and our unregistered users. Currently every day almost half (49.7% today) of our unregistered users go over the 100 free queries they are allotted each day. 35% of those users make less than 1,000 queries per day but more than 100. The remaining 15% go over 1,000 queries and the top 5% go over 10,000.

These daily unregistered users outnumber our daily registered users by exactly 6 to 1. So the problem here is two fold.

1. Half of our unregistered users go unprotected for some part of every day.
2. We have no real way to contact these unregistered customers because .. they're unregistered.

So what this means is we cannot inform these unregistered users of when they go over their query allotment so that their services remain protected. And that means we cannot refer those 15% of users that would go over even our 1,000 free queries to a paid plan.

It also means we have to handle millions of daily queries which are not being answered by our API but are hitting our server infrastructure.

So what are we going to do about it? - Well there's many options, take away the unregistered plan would be the most obvious one but we're not going to do that. What we are going to do is make a good faith effort to contact unregistered users that go well into high volume query amounts.

So to be specific only unregistered users will receive emails from us and only if we can track them down based on their querying IP Address. For some it's not so difficult as often the users making the highest queries are using dedicated hosting which point to a specific domain.

If we're not able to contact some of the high volume unregistered users (and we're really talking about unregistered users who are making 50,000-100,000+ queries per day) then we may block their IP Addresses from accessing our cluster. However this isn't something we're doing currently and not something I believe we'll need to do frequently.

We've already been able to contact a few of our unregistered users that are in that top 5% category of making over 10,000 queries per day with some good results.

The big takeaway from all this though is if you're one of our unregistered users now is a great time to get yourself registered. You not only go from 100 to 1,000 daily free queries but you can monitor your daily and monthly query volumes and get automatic alerts if you go over your daily allotment plus you get a breakdown of your positive detections, query tagging, and white/black list support as part of our customer dashboard.

Thanks for reading, if you have any questions about this or anything else please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected] we do read and respond to every email. We hope everyone has a great day!