One of the things I did to help manage Fabjectory mentions on the Internet was to develop a mini application that pulled in search results from a couple different sources and let me track and report on my responses to them. To pull this off, I used a number of free API’s whose results I brought in, stored and reported against. It’s been useful enough that I’ve been considering splitting it out into a standalone service, but reading this O’Reilly Radar article on the 6 Basic Truths of Free APIs has given me pause.

If I go ahead with commercializing it as a service, it’s likely I’d need to make the API dependent features part of the “premium” package to directly attribute their costs to that of the API’s.