Comment by lojack

The first time I had the plug pulled on a public API a product I worked on used sucked pretty bad. At this point its happened to me so many times that its just another line item of business risks thats an inevitability. I've never worked at a company that failed to recover as a result. Then again, I've never worked at a company whose entire business hinged on one single API.

The likelihood of things breaking or behaving in unexpected ways are data points I think about when assessing risk irrespective of whether an API is public or not. In some industries even the public APIs are more risky than using the unofficial Venmo API likely is.