I named my product after an activist slogan. It's my best and worst decision.

I'm a solo developer in Brazil. For the past year I've been building an API that returns public data from Instagram, TikTok and YouTube — profiles, posts, engagement metrics. The kind of thing you need when you're building a creator analytics tool or a client dashboard and you don't want to maintain scrapers forever.

I called it ScrapingIsNotACrime.

That name has been the single most consequential product decision I've made, and I still can't tell you whether it was right. Here's the honest accounting, because I think the tradeoff generalizes beyond my weird little niche.

Why I did it

The phrase comes from the CFAA debate — the argument that accessing publicly available data shouldn't be treated as unauthorized access to a computer system. I believe that. I also had zero budget for distribution and needed a name people would remember after seeing it once.

It worked on both counts. Nobody forgets it. And it stakes out a position immediately, which for a developer tool is worth more than a clean abstract name nobody can spell.

What it cost me

Three things I didn't anticipate:

It filters my funnel before anyone reads a word. A percentage of people see the domain and close the tab — not because they object, but because they can't put that URL in a procurement request. I made myself unbuyable by anyone with a legal department. For a bootstrapped product targeting indie developers that's arguably fine. It also means my ceiling is lower than it needed to be, and I decided that before I had any evidence about who my customers would be.

It attracts the wrong questions first. Every conversation starts with legality instead of the product. I spend the first ten minutes explaining that it's public data only, no login bypass, nothing behind an auth wall — before anyone asks what the API actually returns. The name pre-loads an objection I then have to spend my credibility disarming.

Using an activist phrase commercially is a fair thing to criticize. I took a line from a legal-rights argument and put it on a pricing page. I've made peace with it, but I've stopped pretending it's not a real objection.

The thing I actually got wrong

The name isn't the mistake. The mistake was letting the name's energy leak into the rest of the copy.

Because the brand is confrontational, I wrote confrontational marketing. My homepage leaned hard on evasion language — the whole vocabulary of beating detection. It reads like a tool for doing something you shouldn't.

Meanwhile the actual product is the boring, defensible thing: public data, stable schemas, flat pricing, no auth walls. I spent a year building something conservative and describing it like something reckless. Then I wondered why the conversations were hard.

I'm rewriting all of it now. Same product, same capabilities, vocabulary of infrastructure instead of vocabulary of evasion. If you're in any category where the market's legitimacy is contested, that's the lesson I'd hand you: pick whichever brand you want, but let your copy be more boring than your brand. Provocative name, conservative claims. I did it backwards.

Where I actually am

[FILL IN YOUR REAL NUMBERS — signups, paying customers, MRR, or "pre-revenue" if that's the truth. Do not round up. This is the paragraph people scroll to, and it's the one where inflating costs you everything.]

Distribution is the wall right now. I built for a year and did marketing for a week, which is the classic solo-dev inversion and I walked into it fully aware, which somehow makes it worse. I'm currently working through directories, dev.to, and API marketplaces. If that experiment produces anything worth reporting I'll post the numbers here.

What I'd like input on

Two real questions, not rhetorical ones:

Has anyone here rebranded away from a memorable-but-limiting name after getting traction? I keep going back and forth on whether the domain is an asset I should lean into or a ceiling I should escape while it's still cheap to move.
For those selling developer tools: did per-request pricing or subscriptions work better for you? I'm on credits that never expire, which developers seem to like and which makes my revenue completely unpredictable.

The product is at scrapingisnotacrime.com if you want to see what I'm describing. There's a free tier, though I'd honestly rather have the naming argument in the comments than the signups.