APIs can have a huge impact on your business, creating value and delivering new income streams. But they don’t always do so in the way you might have had envisioned at the outset. Which means, when it comes to API monetization, it can pay to be prepared for the unexpected.
You’ve developed an amazing API product. Fantastic. But that’s just the beginning of your journey. Starting an API-first company brings with it a whole host of unique challenges for you to face along the way. Based on Moesif’s own experience of founding an API-first company, we’ve shared some insights below to help you avoid some of the pitfalls and make the most of the opportunities that lie before you. “API-first” can mean different things to different people.
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.
In 2015 GraphQL was created by Facebook as an alternative to REST APIs to give more power to frontend developers by making API calls more flexible. GraphQL achieves this goal by providing its API consumers with a query language that allows them to query just the data they need. While GraphQL can improve frontend developer experience, its specification doesn’t have opinions on security.
Have you ever paid a bill for electricity, internet, or water? Was that bill based upon the amount of resources you used?
Developer experience. If you provide APIs or API-first products, you likely hear that term a lot. After all, you need developers for an API to succeed — and if they don’t have a great experience, they’ll move on.
We’ve all heard the terms API product or API-as-a-product. The terms themselves seemed to be used quite freely, leaving some of us with an assumption of what is meant but without a really solid grasp. As joining and contributing to the API economy becomes more desirable, API products are a crucial part of any business that is looking to tap into it. So asking “what is an API product?” is a really relevant question with many different angles.
The meteoric rise of Product-Led Growth, or PLG, has transformed business within the world of technology. One sector in particular has found incredibly fertile ground, that being, API-driven companies. This is in part because API-driven companies offer an easy-to-adopt platform that is highly customizable. Top product led growth companies Twilio and Stripe are often listed as the luminaries in the API space, because of their disruptive approach and their wildly high valuations.
There’s a common misconception that product-led growth means a business doesn’t focus on sales. That’s not the case. It’s just that product-led growth layers in sales later in the customer journey. This can be a hugely effective approach, particularly when it’s combined with deep data insights to drive that growth. For API-first companies, this product-led approach is a cornerstone of success.
API providers need to observe their APIs to get meaningful data about whether and how they are consumed in practice. API observability is a form of monitoring that passively logs API traffic to an observability service. Different from traditional API monitoring, with API observability you: Monitor interactions to improve developer experience Understand how customers use your API Troubleshoot your API Observing REST APIs is well understood and supported, but not every API is a REST API.
