It’s not the first time a company exposes ability to integrate with their data and services while growing, and closes it down after stabilization. Oops, why give data away for free when it can be monetized. So why does it happen again and again? Because Venture Capitalist backed companies have the need to grow as big as possible, to allow investors to have those 10x returns on their big deposits. Investors are looking for products that can synergize and create their own ecosystem. When you’re as big as Salesforce, or Facebook, or Jira, or Unity3D, companies start popping up with their only sole way of income being creating plugins for that ecosystem. This is a very comfortable position to be in, because, by creating plugins, someone else pays the money for your growth, so of course they create APIs muttering about “openness”. And when the company controls the market, it dictates the terms. But the growth of those behemoth companies is not natural, more often than not third party integrations have more profit than the company whose data they use (Is Twitter on plus yet?). The maniac craze of finding a way to get money from all those users and all this data begins. Before it flops and they won’t be able to get more money from investors due to a down round.

The lowest hanging fruit to monetize is the huge amount of data this company has (hey, Google and Facebook are doing pretty well on that front). Close the gates! Close the APIs behind 7 locks! The “openness” has boosted the companies to the billion valuation position and has outgrown it’s usefulness. Who cares about all those other companies, money and time invested to create plugins for the product.