Around 2000 there was a dial-up service called Juno. It took about 15% of your screen to show a rotating banner ad and had some time limit for use. As far as I recall every restriction was implemented in the client.
As such there was a really easy workaround to connect directly without using their software and bypass every restriction.
A guy I know used that workaround and at some point got a letter in the mail from them because he was in the top 1% of users of the service which was very costly to them so they terminated the account.
My hunch is even small scale abuse of a system can have a big effect. Even if it seems small it still might be impactful.
I set up a local BBS-like system and used the real NetZero* dialer to call it and attempt to log in. Then I changed my password and repeated the process several times.
That gave me the key to the Caesar cipher they used for the password.. so I could create a fresh account with a scrambled password any time I wanted.
At runtime, in the OS-provided ad-free dialer, I'd use the unscrambled password.
I also pre-created some accounts with unscrambled passwords like "apple" and "bicycle" to share with friends.
NetZero* ceased operations mere weeks after I started this.. Hm.
(* Was it NetZero specifically, or some clone? I forget..)
Reminds me of free dotcoms back in the late 1990s just up until the dotcom bubble burst: free but with a frame with a banner. 14 year old me enjoyed learning how to load (and then design around) my own page in that frame.
We weren't technically savvy at all, but still found a loophole. There was a version of the software that crashed after you had successfully connected. As long as you didn't update, you were ad-free.
As such there was a really easy workaround to connect directly without using their software and bypass every restriction.
A guy I know used that workaround and at some point got a letter in the mail from them because he was in the top 1% of users of the service which was very costly to them so they terminated the account.
My hunch is even small scale abuse of a system can have a big effect. Even if it seems small it still might be impactful.