6 Reasons To Monetize Your APIs With Apigee

Deciding you want to build an API monetization strategy is the first step, but what comes next? With multiple API platforms available, it's difficult to determine which ones can actually meet your business' needs. Apigee API monetization is a comprehensive and flexible solution that allows you to turn your current digital assets into new revenue streams and business innovations.

(New to API Monetization? Here are 15 frequently asked questions about API Monetization.)

WE’VE FOUND THERE ARE SIX COMPELLING REASONS TO MONETIZE YOUR APIs WITH APIGEE:

1. FORRESTER NAMED APIGEE THE 2020 Q3 API MANAGEMENT PLATFORM LEADER

Assessing 15 API management solutions against a set of pre-defined criteria, the Forrester Wave™: API Management Solutions, Q3 2020 explains why they chose Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform as the Leader.

In addition to being named a leader, Google Cloud received the highest possible score in the market presence category and the strategy category criteria of product vision, planned enhancements, and current offerings. The criteria analyzed included API user engagement, REST API documentation, formal lifecycle management, data validation and attack protection, API product management, and analytics and reporting.

2. APIGEE WAS RECOGNIZED BY GARTNER FOR BEING A POWERFUL, FULL LIFE CYCLE API MANAGEMENT TOOL

API programs cannot run effectively without full life cycle API management. Therefore, having the right API management tool is crucial for managing API complexity.

According to Gartner, today’s full life cycle API management requires:

• The planning, design, implementation, testing, publication, operation, consumption, maintenance, versioning and retirement of APIs
• Delivery of a developer portal through which to target, market to, and govern communities of developers who embed APIs
• Runtime management
• Estimation of APIs’ value
• The use of analytics to understand patterns of API usage

With this criteria in mind, Gartner recognized Google Cloud’s Apigee as a leader for full life cycle API management for the fourth time.

3. APIGEE HAS AN EXPANSIVE MARKET PRESENCE

Organizations that use Apigee for their digital transformation efforts include:

• 6 of the top 10 healthcare companies
• 7 of the top 10 retailers
• 5 of the top 10 financial services companies 
• 6 of the top 10 telecom providers

In addition, many global organizations impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic have continued to invest in Apigee as part of doubling down on their digital strategy.

4. APIGEE LETS YOU LAUNCH FASTER AND LEARN MORE POST-LAUNCH

Apigee API monetization has extensive, end-to-end capability to support the creation and configuration of a wide range of API packages, revenue models, reports, payment gateways, and developer portal integrations.

This capacity means API providers can launch more quickly and gain valuable insights from API monetization much sooner. These flexible and easy scalable monetization tools include:

• Monetization reports to access focused usage information and transaction activity such as defining apps, devs, API product bundles and any other transaction activity for a given date range. It can also generate a summary or detailed reports tracking API usage.
• Billing adjustments to allow for changes to billing details such as increasing or decreasing the revenue share for a custom billing period due to a record discrepancy in your records.
• The ability to issue credits for dev options with the flexibility to issue these credits with the highest range of terms, and tracked automatically by Apigee.
• Posting refunds giving customers a very flexible opportunity to refund developers for "purchase transactions" in case of failure or other issues.
• Scheduling monetization jobs that are pre-scheduled to run at designated times.

5. APIGEE IS FLEXIBLE AND CUSTOMIZABLE TO ADAPT TO YOUR UNIQUE NEEDS

Want to charge developers individually? Done. Decide to create revenue-sharing configurations for the use of your APIs? Handled. Even bundling rate plans and configurations into API products is taken care of in Apigee.

Not only can you customize the rates, you can also create rules to define which API calls qualify as a monetized transaction and thereby enforce monetization limits on API proxies.

API monetization strategy should fit each company’s unique needs. That’s why Apigee’s is flexible and customizable, offering a range of rate plans—while making it easy to switch between individual plans or a combination offer.

6. APIGEE PROVIDES RICH, MONETIZATION SPECIFIC, OUT-OF-THE-BOX REPORTING FOR ALL USER TYPES

Data drives the digital world and Apigee’s API monetization platform provides the granular data that businesses need to inform their overall strategy. Detailed reports covering API traffic and developer consumption—along with adjustments and credits—means businesses can see and understand the value of what they’re offering. Even better, Apigee’s API monetization streamlines the billing process, so taxes, international support, and generating bills are included in the system.

Specifically, these monetization reports enable business users, manager and developers to to have an insight-driven API program with options to sort by:

• Billing - to analyze developer usage patterns by billing cycles
• Prepaid Balance - to view user balance refills and reconcile with payment processor
• Revenue - to analyze revenue generation patterns by various developers
• Variance - to analyze trends in the performance of API packages and products across developers (and their applications)

These six compelling reasons are part of why Keller Williams turned to SoftServe’s dedicated Apigee team for their next steps into API management.

AN API MONETIZATION SUCCESS STORY

Andrea Barto, Director of Engineering at Keller Williams, and SoftServe’s dedicated Apigee practice joined forces with the goal to improve automation while streamlining agents’ daily activities by opening Keller Williams’ API to external vendors.

First, Keller Williams selected Google Cloud’s Apigee for its versioning ability, security, and ease of use within its developer portal. Then SoftServe optimized different Apigee platform integrations, including:

• Building the API Specs for their Developer Portal
• Applying standards such as OpenAPI and OAuth 2
• Setting up smart alerts and notifications for error handling
• Integrating Google Services (Pubsub, Stackdriver) functionality into API proxies using extensions
• Configuring API usage thresholds and quotas
• Organizing SDLC of API development using Apigee Edge
• Coordinating the setup of the CI/CD pipeline with Circle-CI
• Providing production support for external vendors and customers with help of Apigee Monitoring & Analytics Dashboards
• Introducing testing automation strategy
• Using Apigee API versioning capabilities to provide legacy support

By optimizing Keller Williams API management via Apigee, the company is able to use its existing (and valuable) digital assets to create additional revenue streams—as well as track usage and analytics for reporting. Apigee has also simplified business activities for agents, leading to a better overall experience for all stakeholders.

Barto describes the future of Keller Williams as bright as they continue to bring greater value and applications to the Keller Williams Marketplace. You can check out the full story of this project by watching this webinar.

Let's Talk about how you can monetize your APIs effectively and efficiently today.