To monetize your APIs, you must create Product Plans with pricing information that allow
API consumers to subscribe to your Plans with integrated billing.
About this task
When you decide to charge customers to use your API Products, your customers have different
requirements for the number of API calls that they are willing to pay for. You can solve this issue
by defining Plans at different levels of service, and at different costs.
Within your Product, you can define free Plans as well as Plans that contain billing integration.
The following instructions guide you through defining a Plan with pricing information. For more
detailed information about creating Products, see Creating a draft
Product and Editing a draft Product.
Important: Products that contain a billing integration cannot be re-staged into
non-production Catalogs. To experiment with billing on the Sandbox Catalog, or any other
non-production Catalogs, you must publish new versions of your monetized Product. This practice
aligns with how you have to work with production Catalogs currently, as they also don't support the
re-staging of existing versions of the same Product.
Procedure
To add pricing information to a Product Plan, complete the following steps:
- In the API
Manager,
click
Develop.
-
Select the Products tab.
-
Select the Product that you want to add billing integration to, or create a new draft Product
by clicking and
following the wizard.
-
With the Product open and the Design tab selected, select
Plans in the navigation menu.
-
In the Billing integration section, select the billing integration
resource that you want to apply to the Product.
In the Plans section, you can then either edit the Default Plan to add
pricing information, or create a new Plan with pricing information.
- If this is a new Plan, enter a Title, and if you
require approval for someone to subscribe to this Plan also select the
Approval checkbox.
- In the Plan pricing section, complete the following steps to add the
pricing information:
- Change the toggle to On for Plan
pricing.
The Plan pricing definition section is
displayed.
- Optional: If you want to include any free trial days in your Plan, select
Include free trial days, and then enter the number of trial days that a
subscriber can use the Plan without charge, after which their billing cycle begins.
- Select the Currency for the billing process
use.
-
Enter the Price per month to bill the subscriber for.
If the selected currency supports fractional units, enter the price including any fractional
units, such as cents.
- Optional:
In the Plan rate limits section, set the rate limits by entering the
number of calls that are allowed per unit of time.
Remember that this rate limit applies
only to this Plan. You can set multiple rate limits, at second, minute, hour, day, and week time
intervals. You can override this Plan rate limit for specific endpoints if you prefer, adding a
different rate limit or enabling unlimited calls to it. You can also create more Plans with
different rate limits. For more information about rate limits, see
Understanding rate
limits for APIs and Plans.
- Optional:
Select the Hard limit checkbox if you want the gateway to reject any
calls beyond the specified rate, rather than adding them to a queue to be resolved when the limits
reset.
- Optional:
Add more burst limits, GraphQL limits, and assembly limits, as appropriate for your
APIs.
-
Complete the Plan APIs section if you want to customize the APIs and
operations that are available in this Plan.
- If you want to add more Plans to the Product, repeat the process from Step 6.
-
Click Save to save the Product.
Results
Your Product with billing integration and a pricing Plan is listed in the
Products dashboard of the Develop area. If your Product
doesn't appear, click the Refresh icon 
to refresh the results from the server.
What to do next
Stage your Product to a Catalog. For more information, see Staging a draft
Product.