Running your API Business
Are you an API provider who is interested in growing your API community? Creating new business opportunities? Or simply interested in making some revenue from your API community for your APIs? Then you have come to the right place.
As an API provider somewhere down the line there will come a time where you would want to get something back for all the hard work which you put into creating/designing and managing your production APIs. In other words we can put this as “Monetizing” your APIs. From the word “Monetize” you can guess that this means $$MONEY$$. Let’s dig into what this really means to an API provider.
API Monetization is a way in which you can build up various API consumption models for your API consumers. This feature allows you to bill your end users on behalf of you for your APIs.
What kind of consumption models can I build up??
Let me give you some examples
- Freemium model: Subscribers can access the APIs for free until a threshold is hit. You allow X number of free calls but when the consumption exceeds X you will charge your subscribers.
- Paid model: Subscribers pay for accessing the APIs. Subscribers are charged for their API calls through your APIs
- Free model: Subscribers access the APIs for free.
- Paid model with whitelisted subscribers: You can charge subscribers for your APIs while you are able to white list certain users from not being charged. Perhaps your internal consumers.
How hard is API Monetization? Why can’t I do this myself?
Building up an API Monetization framework is not easy as it looks. When we consider about Monetization there are multiple aspects to it which we need in order to make it a complete experience for your consumers. I know you will agree when you go through some of the challenges of API Monetization.
- Collecting and storing payment information
- Ensuring PCI compliance
- Creating subscription and billing workflows
- Integrating workflows with a statistics system
- Performing customer invoicing and self-service billing information access
- Implementing freemium models
- Providing fine grained access control and advanced API security
- Providing usage and overage calculation
- Enabling alerts and notifications for expired credit cards, etc.
But don’t worry we’ve got your back. We have solved this burden and provided an amazing feature called API Monetization in the WSO2 API Cloud which helps you achieve the above listed challenges and much more to add increased value and revenue for your API platform. We have integrated our API platform with a billing and fine grained subscription model for your benefit.
Key Features of WSO2 API Cloud Monetization
Rate Plans — Flexibility to define your own billing models for different levels of subscriptions.
Over usage — Provides the capability to define usage limits for your APIs and charge on exceeding certain defined levels
Monitor your consumer’s usage : Provides statistics to view/download the usage of your API consumers so you can get an idea in the direction of improvements and focus.
Trusted billing system : Incorporated billing provider for a secure and reliable billing system.
Dashboards for your API consumers : Not only you, your API consumers are also able to view their usage statistics so they can keep track of their API usage
Attach many consumption models for your APis : Flexibility to attach more than on consumption plan for your APIs
Fine grained access for your APIs : Control the access to your APIs using user groups and blacklisting/whitelisting.
I have mentioned only some of the features available with the API Cloud Monetization feature above. You can read more about all the value additions which you can get with the API Cloud Monetization feature in this article.
Sign up to the WSO2 API Cloud and enable Monetization for your APIs today!!
How can I get started using this feature?
You can follow this guide https://docs.wso2.com/display/APICloud/Enable+Monetization to enable the feature for your API portal.
For further questions and inquiries please feel free to reach out to our Cloud support team through our email cloud@wso2.com. Hope to see you around!
