Platforms are starting to put tighter limits on what AI products can do with their data and APIs, and some of those rules can turn an ordinary integration into a revenue problem almost overnight. In this week’s issue, I dig into what ServiceTitan’s breakup with Podium says about where those rules are heading, and what to look at now if another company has the power to change how your product works.

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I have now read ServiceTitan's API terms of service twice, which I suspect puts me in a group of about eleven people, most of them lawyers.

The reason is Eric Rea, who runs Podium. On August 12, ServiceTitan's co-founders emailed roughly 1,000 customers the two companies share to say their integration ends September 15. Rea says he found out "at the exact same time, the exact same day, as customers did."

The companies had been partners for nine years. Somewhere in those nine years a ServiceTitan executive sat through a Podium demo and told Rea, "There is no competitor to ServiceTitan until the demo I saw from you guys today."

This was meant as a compliment. It was also a diagnosis.

Podium is not small. It claims 60,000 customers, a $3 billion valuation and $100 million in AI agent revenue built from nothing in under two years. It sells its own field service product and integrates with three of ServiceTitan's competitors.

By Rea's account it saw this coming for two years: "They wanted a substantial cut of revenue that ultimately comes out of your pocket, and they wanted us to agree to stop building anything that competed with them."

Then, about three months ago, ServiceTitan stopped answering. "After months of silence, their response was a termination notice with 30 days to figure it out."

ServiceTitan's version is drier, the way a landlord's version is always drier. Podium was on "a legacy partnership that had run its course." There was a certification program. Podium declined to certify. Both sides agree on exactly one thing: the relationship ended on paperwork.

The paperwork was public the whole time. ServiceTitan added AI restrictions to its API terms on April 15 and posted certification requirements on June 24. Anyone could have read them.

I did, eventually, and it is a lot like reading the warranty card for a dishwasher. Nobody reads it the day it arrives. You read it standing in an inch of water, and that is when you find out who it was really protecting.

Four other platforms rewrote the same kind of clause within a year.

SAP's version bans most of what an AI product does for a living. It now prohibits "interaction or integration with (semi-) autonomous or generative AI systems that plan, select, or execute sequences of API calls." If your product does anything on a schedule, or in a loop, against somebody else's interface, that sentence is about you.

HubSpot's May update is blunter, and almost cheerful about it: agents "don't exist in a legal grey area." (Slack and Shopify restricted training on their data instead.)

The two groups of clauses are not doing the same job. Slack, Shopify and HubSpot care what you did with the data after you got it. SAP and ServiceTitan care what your product does while it runs. A company that trains nothing and runs inference all day is fine under the first group and in trouble under the second.

That was Podium's problem. As Rea put it: "We can go copy anything that our partners do, but anything that our partners build that's remotely close to what we already have, you can't do."

It had a replacement product, three other channels and 60,000 customers to spread 1,000 lost accounts across, which is under 2% of its base. A company doing $1 million to $10 million a year might have 1,000 accounts total. It also has no COO and no general counsel to hand the terms to. The person who reads the API agreement is the founder, probably on a phone, probably in bed.

So I went looking for the sentence. Say I ran a company whose agent logs into Shopify every night and rewrites product descriptions. Shopify's new clause says merchant data "may not be used for development or training of AI or machine learning systems."

Is an agent that reads the data and acts on it "development"?

I wanted a no, and I got one, but not from the Partner Program Agreement. I got it from a Shopify employee answering a question in the developer forum.

A developer forum, for crying out loud.

Inference-only use is fine, the employee said. The rule that decides whether a company like mine keeps its integration lives in a forum thread.

ServiceTitan put its sentence somewhere else again. The API terms changed on April 15. The certification requirements that ended Podium came ten weeks later, as a separate document, and ServiceTitan's stated reason for the termination is that Podium declined to certify under them.

A partner who read the API terms front to back in April had read half of what mattered. Even had they checked a freaking developer forum.

None of this covers the platform that never bothers with paperwork. In December, Datadog cut off a competing startup's API keys with no terms change first.

The documents tell you when a platform has written its intentions down. They say nothing about the ones that haven't.

Podium had warning, a product, alternate channels and scale. On September 15 it finds out what all of that was worth.

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Thanks for reading. See you next Wednesday.
— Jason

P.S. If the platform you build on could copy you, The SaaSpocalypse Is Coming for You asks whether your product has a reason to exist.