Scaling your API with rate limiters
I a bit torn here. I love Stripe, but I feel like this is awful advice for API-first companies.<p>If you are building a developer product where your API is your business, using rate-limiters is akin to preventing customers from giving you money. If your product is an API, you should encourage usage. The more usage you get, the more success both you and your customer will have. It's a win-win.<p>Because of this, I believe implementing rate-limiting strategies result in not only poor-DX for the product, but also a loss of trust (if these limits are in place to prevent your backend from failing, what other things do I need to worry about while using your product?), AND most importantly, they result in loss of business for both the API company and the customer.<p>IMO, if you're an API company, and you can't handle bursts of traffic from your customers, you should work on improving your backend and stop wasting time messing around with implementing patterns like this. It's a lose-lose situation for you and your customers.<p>I was really inspired by this recently after spending some time @ Twilio. Jeff (and the rest of the Twilio team) are hardcore about their API first product / thinking. They have a motto which is something along the lines of this: if you and your customer are both more successful and both make more money when the API usage goes up, do whatever you can to get out of the way and let the API be used as much as possible. I thought that was an awesome approach to take.