Embed.ly and his so great customer service
par Nyro, Mardi 27 Septembre 2011 à 17:32:29 :: Programmation
You probably know embed.ly. It is a service which, as its name suggests it, lets embed external content on your own website pretty easily.
The idea of their API is simple: send a media URL of a sharing website (youtube, dailymotion, twitter, google maps, etc... and many others) and the API returns many informations about the media: author, inserted dat, and more important the HTML code to embed the content on your website such as flash player, iframe or others things regarding the needs.
In one word, a real advantage with big time savings for the developper who may propose in a few lines of code a huge number of content sharing sites.
Yeah ok, but why are these guys better than others?
I'm coming to it.
Since it'sversion 2, nyroModal uses embed.ly to display these kind of content directly on modal windows. From only youtube, my open-source project is passed to a multitide of différent video sites, as well as tweets, google maps, and so on...
So great!
the Embed.ly API was at this time free and without limits, requires no registration and no account on their website.
Then Embed.ly evolved. To monetiez their API, they set up various plans and prices. There is still a free API with a minimum of services - same as before - with a 10 000 queries limit per month.
In order to keep nyroModal working, I updated source code on September 17th. I created an API key on embed.ly and use it on my demo page
Ok good. But... nyroModal runs at an average of 1,000 visits per day. A rate of 3 urls that send request to embed.ly, we arrive at the limit in 3 days. Moreover, there is a embed.ly demo page with almost 170 demo links.
In his great goodness, embed.ly sent me an email on September 25 telling me that I came close to this limite (around 8,000). So I decided to place a PHP script to cache embed.ly queries to solve this problem.
On September 26, the commit was sent and I thougt I definitvely solved this problem. Some tests later, it's working great.
Good, and embed.ly is when they are friendly and the best of the world?
I'm there.
September, I've got an email telling me I exceeded the limit... Neither one nor two, I plunged back into the code, I analyze and I draw what I send to embed.ly and how I create the file name cache. In fact, jQuery adds a parameter to the query, simply named "_" to not cache the response.
I immediately coorectedthe bug, commit it, set it up and test it again.
It does not work at all! The answers to embed. Ly are simply empty.
Normal, I exceeded the quota and have to go with a pay plan to continue using the API.
I read the email from embed.ly and see : "Please reply to this email with questions."
Without much hope, I write an email explaining the situation and that I did not pay because I do not make money with.
Then I click around on the Embed.ly dashboard, read their FAQ, prices, etc...
And only 9 minutes later, I received two answers from embed.ly employees:
Hey Cedric,
If you are just using the key as a demo for nyroModal, then there is no
reason for us to charge you. I've updated your account, but I ask that you
add the IPs that your proxy server is going to hit Embedly from here:
https://app.embed.ly/organizations/nyrodev--nyromodal/ip.
This way we can assure that the key is only being used by the demo site.
Thanks,
Sean
Sean just set my API key to a 50 000 queries par month. Free and without further requests for explanations. I quickly my server IP address as requested, and another answer from another employee came up:
Cédric,
I've reset your monthly counter. Enjoy my friend!
Bob Corsaro
Bob put my account of queries to zero for the current month. Exactly what I expected too.
And voilà. These people got it all. Where some companies would surely seek to charge or request futher explanattions, embed.ly, in 10 minutes solved my probelm and encourage me to make open-source:
We love it when people incorporate Embedly into open source projects and we are happy to help out the developers.
I'm confident that this flexibility in their management is because they are only 4 in the team. They can react quickly as they wish.
Finally, use embed.ly! This service works really rellay good and people behing it are at the top of the developper mountain.
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