I was once developing a program for automated trading for my own personal use. In the beginning I made periodical requests to my broker, scraped out the price info, and made orders if the price was right. Once I had something sort of working I decided that I wanted to do this the right way and ask them for permission. They told me I would have to subscribe to a feed through some other program. After many hours of reading the manual and trying to figure out how to transfer the data to my application I again got it sort of working. But I had already started to lose interest and other things had come up in my life.

How is this relevant? Well I would have much preferred paying for scraping, than trying to learn some new api. It increased the transaction cost. If you further have to negotiate with a partner company, that sounds like even more transaction cost, from having to send emails back and forth and the mental effort of negotiating.