State of API developer portals

A detailed review of top 100 API companies about how they expose, manage and monetize their APIs.

Alexandre Airvault

State of API developer portals

A detailed review of top 100 API companies about how they expose, manage and monetize their APIs.

Alexandre Airvault

API business models and pricing

Based on our review of the world’s top 100 API developer portals, we have identified the following trends in terms of pricing and business models.

Top 100 companies business models:

BUSINESS MODEL

STARTING PRICE AVG

AVERAGE COMPANY AGE

PAY AS YOU GO

$15

10 years

SUBSCRIPTION BASED

$185

8 years

Rounded average API prices based on the company website traffic:

BUSINESS MODEL

LOWEST TRAFFIC HALF

HIGHEST TRAFFIC HALF

PAYG (PAY AS YOU GO)

$30

$10

SUBSCRIPTION BASED

$235

$160

Halves split below 600K visitors per month and above.

Rounded average API prices based on the company funding:

BUSINESS MODEL

LOWEST FUNDING HALF

HIGHEST FUNDING HALF

PAYG

$10

$16

SUBSCRIPTION BASED

$200

$160

Halves split below $85m funding and above.

For PAYG business models, no company monetizes their API based on the number of API calls. Instead, business models are based on Credits, MAU, Revenue Sharing or custom metric values. Those values are custom metrics and are closely tied in to the business value provided, either based on minutes, transactions, consumption step, etc. You can check our whitepaper to look at custom metric values for APIs.

Average company age per business model and API type:

BUSINESS MODEL

DATA

PROCESSING

SERVICE

NO PUBLIC INFO

6 years

5 years

8 years

PAYG

9 years

7 years

10 years

SUBSCRIPTION BASED

7 years

10 years

Business model per API type:

No Public Information

Data
Processing
Service

PAYG

Data
Processing
Service

Subscription Based

Data
Processing
Service

The subscription model is widely used for “Service” type APIs whereas this is not the case for “Processing” type APIs. All in all, PAYG is the business model used most.

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