Before I understood the business and politics of the API hustle I used to cry fowl here on API Evangelist about the sudden shifts in plans and pricing for APIs, as well as the unfair and restrictive rate limits put in place for the APIs I depended upon. These things still hurt, and often negatively impact my business, but I am much more aware of the market forces at play now and I understand that it is just “markets working things out”.
The intersection of API rate limits, plans, pricing, and marketplace will continue to heat up in the age of artificial intelligence, and you can see this in action with the recent Slack rate limit changes for non-marketplace apps, which is spelled out via their pricing), rate limits, and marketplace review process. The API service providers who are further along in their API management journey will fare much better in the API consumer environment that has emerged with all the AI agent hustling occurring right now.
API service composition and knowing your API consumer is nothing new, but it is something that many API producers have taken short cuts on because it is something that takes work and building awareness throughout the API lifecycle, but also with the feedback loops you have with your API consumers. Now that the volume on API consumption has been cranked up to 11, those who haven’t been doing this work are going to chewed up and spit out by the denial of service attacks produced by the current artificial intelligence segment of the market–which is the loudest right now.
I used to encourage API producers to open up their API resources, and provide sensible and liberal API plans, pricing, and rate limits. Now I encourage everyone to lock things down. Asterisks – do so at your own peril. What you put out in the open in your API portal, what you provide acess to, how you organize your plans, pricing, and rate limits will shape how successful you are with “locking things down”. And how the “market will work things out” with your business will depend on how mature and sophisticated your marketplace strategy is. When you live by the market, you die by the market, so make sure you’ve thought things through and have a plan.
This intersection is a place that Naftiko is investing in. I’ve been advocating for more machine-readability, automation, observability and control of this intersection for the last decade. Now with Naftiko I can begin putting all the profiling of APIs, their plans, pricing, rate limits, and marketplace apporach to work. While most companies will be in reactive mode when it comes to their digital resources, I will be working to drive the conversation at this intersection, and provide more governance, automation, and control over what we spend on our API resources, while also standardizing the plans, features, pricing, rate limits, scopes, and other properties that are defining the market today.
