One of the most difficult aspects of creating an API service for public consumption is the balance between developer control and user freedom. Ensuring that users can leverage an API to new heights requires a certain amount of freedom, both in modality of usage and in applicability of the use case. The security of underlying systems and the API itself relies on controlling this usage and ensuring a level of control for the greater good.

In the world of software-as-a-service, product-led growth (PLG) is an easy way to enable users to experience the value of a product firsthand, without restrictions. PLG can drive adoption, retention, and sustainable business growth with its robust and open framework. But what drives PLG best, a freemium model or a free trial? With freemium, your top of funnel growth can skyrocket, while free trials see a 2-3x higher conversion rate thanks to urgency (ie, users lose access immediately on trial end).

APIs and their integrations are paramount for the inner and outer workings of SaaS organizations. As such, pricing strategies for API products have taken center stage for businesses as a crucial determinant of success. APIs have become the linchpin of modern software development, enabling applications to communicate, share data, and provide enhanced functionality.

API-first startups must prioritize the development and utilization of their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as the foundation of their growth model. API-based organizations heavily rely on management and analytics to ensure the smooth functioning, monitoring, and optimization of their APIs. However, the decision to build or buy an API management tool becomes crucial as it directly impacts the SaaS provider’s resource allocation, time-to-market, and overall business strategy.

In today’s digital landscape, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) play a crucial role in enabling seamless integration and communication between software applications and platforms. With API technology being front and center in digital transformation, there has been a significant rise in the demand for API-first solutions that offer a wide array of services for software developers.

APIs have become increasingly popular in the current SaaS ecosystem due to their ability to seamlessly integrate software systems. APIs provide standardized ways for applications to share data. API monetization is a powerful way for businesses to drive growth and generate revenue from existing API consumer data and usage. By offering your APIs as products or services, your company can tap into new markets, attract more developers, and create self-sustaining ecosystems around your product line.

Moesif is offering a new Envoy plugin for Envoy’s latest proxy supporting WebAssembly. Envoy is an open-source edge and service L7 proxy designed for cloud-native applications. Originally built at Lyft, it’s now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It provides a universal data plane API and is commonly used as a service mesh in microservices architectures, where it provides advanced load balancing, and API observability.

As part of our mission to serve developers, product managers, and other Moesif users better, we’ve teamed up with the API experts over at WSO2 to connect the capabilities of Moesif and Choreo. Choreo was created by WSO2 to push forward the next generation of application development. Inside Choreo is a SaaS application development suite designed to accelerate the creation of digital experiences.

Many API developers and companies struggle to find ways to easily set up systems to monetize their APIs. Some are simple but not customizable, some are complex and require massive engineering effort to actually get it all running. To make things easier, Moesif created a feature a few months ago called Billing Meters which gives massive customizability but with a minimal amount of code and engineering effort.

This month at Moesif, we released a new usage-based pricing model for our platform. With these changes, we have brought in a new pricing scheme that is better aligned with customer value and requirements. In this article, we will walk through the history of pricing at Moesif and how we designed our latest pricing update, which is our third iteration.