I completely agree that you are shooting yourself in the foot if you are relying on someone else's API for you entire functionality. But there are a few things here -

* Everything Google does is free. So it can be argued that the API is in fact for-profit. * In this case, translation is not something a small company can do by themselves. The API's whole value proposition is that it enables startups without the infrastructure like Google can create interesting applications using the API. Google wants people to do that and its very much a big part of its success so far.

So the developer is not entirely at fault.

I would not rely on that one API itself for my business but he/she chose to do it.