How do you price / bill APIs? What are some best practices in API pricing / billing? Usage, fixed, tiered? What’s worked best for you, given your specific use case / industry / business?
Great question!
@Andrew_Yee would be curious if you have any thoughts here given your experience?
Also tagging @Ulrik – any insights based on past projects?
Usually it’s some maximum number of requests against a given timeframe, e.g. up to 10,000 requests/month. Billing actual use is usually terribly tedious and makes up-front invoicing difficult.
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We currently offer API request plans of 50k/month, 100k/month, and 1M/month. It’s been working well so far.
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Our APIs give our customers access to various types of data that is used for market research. We’re in the process of moving to a credit based model for the API product. We want to charge different amounts for different types of API calls and continue to sell this on a subscription model so we think credits will be a good fit for us.
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just out of interest @Steven_Meyer , will you then have a credit based model (subscription to XX credits I imagine?) just for the API product and will keep charging the other parts of the product with another pricing method?
For us it’s an Add-On with a rate limit. Client’s get access to our APIs and then self-serve.
@Magdalena_Martin1 Our plan is to add more features/ products to the credit model in the future (e.g. we have another product that we call Data Feeds which essentially has the same data as our APIs, but we push the data to customers via a feed). Other parts of the product will remain on other price models, yes.
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Thank you Steven! That’s interesting. I wonder at what point having different ways to charge can get complicated for a client. Especially when usage and credits are involved. Subscription and credits make more sense.
Thank you so much!