Building a business around another platform can be extremely profitable, but has great risk attached to it as well. We have seen this time and time again. Be it changes to Twitter's API or changes to Instagram's API, it happens time and time again. The only way to stay safe from this is to build your business around an open source system, like Wordpress. However, I do think that there should be at least some protection against moves like these - depending on context of course.

If a company sees you bottling their moat, of course they’re going to come after you. I think this particular thing could have been symbiotic, and maybe valuable enough to be a reasonable acquisition target by Amazon, but it’s hard to thread that needle as a 3rd party tool, especially when many of them are adversarial because of lack of official API support, or the general difficulty of running a business based entirely off another business’s data.