OffenderWatch processed 80 million API requests daily. After implementing rate limiting and bot protection, that number dropped to 2.5 million. A 97% reduction.
The CEO got back hours of his day. The development team stopped spending two to three hours managing rules manually. Infrastructure costs, human attention, operational complexity: all calibrated to a false baseline. They weren't operating at scale. They were operating at the scale of their bot problem.
What they'd been scraping for free? They turned it into a paid product. Those 2.5 million requests that remained were the ones that actually mattered.