There are APIs, and in my opinion, just falling back to a different HTTP API would probably be easier than parsing HTML. Though I use one of those APIs for a dynamic DNS client I built, and I've never actually seen a rate limit on them, even if I'm calling them every minute. I appreciate you showing them the benefit of the doubt here, but in my opinion the more likely answer is just that the person who did this is just underinformed on the state of quality of life-improving public APIs.