I am spending a significant amount of time looking through the pricing pages for leading API providers, working to get a sense for some of the common approaches to API monetization in use across the space. Along the way I am finding some simple approaches from API providers that I wanted to share as bit-size API planning stories here on the blog.
After recently landing on the pricing page for identity service provider Auth0, I saw that they included a simple message and link to the latest blog post about API pricing changes. It is a simple, subtle, yet very prominent approach to making sure your API consumers are aware of pricing changes that may impact their integration. I recently wrote about providing a messaging area to reach developers upon platform login, but this approach from Auth0 is about providing relevant messaging no matter where you are at in the developer portal–not just at login.
Couple of lessons for me, extracted from this approach:
- Prominent FMA - Providing a prominently placed, flexible messaging area, can help make sure your API consumers stay up to speed on the latest, when it comes to platform operations.
- Pricing Storytelling - Telling the story around each change in pricing is a critical aspect of operation. Publishing a story on your blog, syndicating out through your social channels, and prominent placement via a FMA is key.
This help rekenforce the fact that we should make sure to regularly communicating out our decisions around API monetization. Also making sure there is a saturation factor to our messaging, and that it is available via our blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other relevant page or channel used to reach API consumers.
I have a whole list of bit-size API monetization, pricing, and planning stories queued up. I will try to space them out, alongside other stories, but you will just have to suffer a little as I spend time expanding on my API monetization, and API plans research areas.
