Jason Lemkin bought 30+ APIs this year and exactly one vendor asked how it went.

In an August 6 SaaStr post, Lemkin reports only Exa followed up: an email from a product-team member four days after his first real batch of API calls, asking for a one-liner, attaching $50 in credits with no strings. He replied within three hours with ~400 words including production specs a sales org would never have surfaced: 145k B2B executives in the matching product, 10 QPS throughput requirement, 89% accuracy on an adversarial dataset. The arithmetic: a PM running 20 of these a week hits 250 conversations a quarter, covering activation, product research and expansion. Usage-triggered, not signup-triggered. That's the entire trick and it costs nothing.