Monetize APIs

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When you create and configure your APIs in webMethods API Gateway, you can create a monetization strategy for your APIs. Use webMethods API Gateway to create packages and plans. As an API provider or API product manager, you can configure the packages and plans as your organization requirements to monetize your APIs.

The general flow to monetize APIs is
  1. API provider or product manager performs the following tasks.
    1. Creates packages by grouping the relevant APIs
    2. Create plans for different tiers with different SLAs
    3. Associate the plans to packages
    4. Publish packages and plans to the Developer portal (optional)
  2. API consumer browses different packages and plans and subscribes for the required package and plan that suits the purpose.
  3. API provider or Product manager approves the subscription when approval is enabled and also monitors the usage.

When you add an API to a package for monetization, the API Key authentication mechanism is automatically added to the IAM policy at API level. If the API already contains an IAM policy that has two authentication mechanisms with the AND condition, then the condition is switched to OR. This function makes sure that the monetization is supported when certain consumer applications access the API by just using the API key.

In a typical API Monetization solution, you have the following components.

  • webMethods API Gateway- You can create APIs, packages, and plans and host them in webMethods API Gateway. In addition, you can enforce quota and rate limits and monitor the API usage.
    Note: If you are configuring API consumption rate limits for any purpose other than monitoring, apply the Traffic optimization policy, instead of packaging. For more information about the policy, see Traffic Optimization.
  • Billing solution - You can convert the APIs, Packages and Plans into billable products. To do customer information and billing-related activities here, based on the usage quota.
  • webMethods Developer Portal - Here consumers can find and subscribe to the API packages and plans.
Note: With webMethods API Gateway 10.11, you can create a subscription by using the Subscription REST API. For more infomration about this API, see Subscription Management.

webMethods API Gateway does not support a billing solution. However, it provides the following extensions, which you can use to integrate with a billing system.

  • APIs to create, read, update, delete the APIs, packages, plans and subscriptions.
  • Extensible model that enables extending metadata for packages, plans and subscriptions to store extra (billing or consumer related) data.
  • Provides support to track the changes to assets. You can use the Search API to retrieve the audit data. You can also configure the audit data to be pushed to different destinations as and when a change occurs. For more details about the Search API, see API Gateway Search. For more details about custom destination, see Destination configuration.
  • webMethods API Gateway monitors the usage and transactions. APIs are available to retrieve the monitoring and transactions data or you can configure webMethods API Gateway to push this data to different destinations. You can configure alerts to be sent to different destinations for different metrics. To learn more, see Transaction Data.
  • webMethods API Gateway provides APIs to retrieve the usage information per API or a subscription. You can use this data to determine the quota usage and for billing purposes.
Note: To view usage metrics, you must either add a log invocation policy to each API or use global policy to generate transaction events.

On the webMethods API Gateway to Developer Portal integration, webMethods API Gateway supports publishing APIs, packages, and plans to Developer Portal and also supports creating subscriptions from the Developer Portal. Also, webMethods API Gateway pushes API transactions to the Developer Portal.