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Monetize Your APIs in AWS Marketplace Using API Gateway
- anilgulecha 10y agoThe uptake on this will be dependent on how comfortable developers feel about building completely off AWS's infra. I'm optimistic about such an approach -- a lot of infra effort (maintaining servers & service/marketing) is expended innumerable times across all SaaS services/APIs.
- patrizz 10y agoThese aws guys are literally putting the pieces together while we're watching. This is something I'll definitely will give a try.
- scrollaway 10y ago"01 DEC 2016" was this just announced or was it actually announced last month?
- weavie 10y agoI'm not sure I really understand the pet store example given. What are some actual examples of this that people would actually use?
- philliphaydon 10y agoMaxmind does geo ip lookup, you pay for the number of queries you issue. That sort of thing I would assume.
- cm2187 10y agoAlso sending text messages, xml-whois api, etc...
- tyingq 10y agoStreet address correction would be popular.
- mateuszf 10y agoResize an image, transcode video.
- tyingq 10y agoAssuming an AWS hosted service would save both the buyer and seller the egress charges, that's probably the killer use case. Captive gardens like to grow.
- osullivj 10y agoNeed a US bank account to sell [1]. Not quite as restrictive as devpay's requirement for a US legal entity, but still a hassle. I think I'll stick with a free AMI and stripe/quaderno for payments/VAT for license keys to unlock premium features. [1] http://awsmp-loadforms.s3.amazonaws.com/AWS_Marketplace_-_Seller_Guide.pdf http://awsmp-loadforms.s3.amazonaws.com/AWS_Marketplace_-_Se...
- adaml_623 10y agoThere are companies like World First[0] who work with Amazon resellers to repatriate funds for people who sell through Amazon. They set up a virtual bank account for the resellers. I think they would enable this type of business. [0] - https://www.worldfirst.com/uk/online-sellers/?al https://www.worldfirst.com/uk/online-sellers/?al
- GordonS 10y agoSorry, what does AMI stand for?
- erickt 10y agoAmazon Machine Instance [1]. Its the name Amazon uses for the virtual machine image running on AWS. 1: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AMIs.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AMIs.html
- davnicwil 10y agoWhat I'd like to know is: if you call an API you didn't pay for, will a 402 be returned? ;-)
- jk563 10y agoIn this instance it's paid for after use with the standard AWS billing. Only a matter of time though!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tzm 10y agoFor posterity: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/api-reference/handling-errors/#api-error-codes http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/api-reference/handling...
- slackoverflower 10y agoDespite all the complaints and open letters about Amazon's horrible work culture and bad organization, they seemed to be building great products at an amazing pace. I read somewhere that AWS deployed 1000 new features to production every week. Whatever they're doing, it seems to be working. My only complaint is that most of their UI interfaces feel like Web 1.0
- coldtea 10y agoI'd rather they had a better work culture and deployed less than "1000 new features every week", in the same way I don't care for cheap sneakers made in sweatshops.
- MichaelBurge 10y agoThat's for their employees to worry about. They're not helpless - they're software developers with high demand.
- coldtea 10y agoPeople get into abusive contracts and stay with them for all shorts of reasons. Most abused spouses are not literally helpless either. They are physically able to go to the police, break the relationship, fight back, etc, but human needs and psychology are not black and white. And of course just because they decided to "put up with it" or the extra compensation makes it justified for them, doesn't mean the abuse isn't there. If someone gives a huge tip, it doesn't mean it's OK for them to mistreat the waiter. It just makes them more of a jerk.
- forgetsusername 10y ago>Most abused spouses are not literally helpless either. Comparing Amazon employees to battered spouses is a stretch. Some might even say it's ignorant.
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- LeicaLatte 10y agoMashape does a good job of this but Amazon can take this to another level.
- MichaelBurge 10y agoWhat are the advantages of using AWS over selling the API yourself? I can think of a few: * AWS handles the billing software for you. * AWS markets to enterprise companies who already have billing integrated and pay a lot of money. So less hassle collecting payment, and less resistance to charging lots. * You get the AWS brand associated with your API, so people may be more likely to trust it. What other reasons would somebody use this?
- raverbashing 10y agoNot having to deal with Paypal seems to be a plus
- mullen 10y agoThe main reason I can think of is, if you make an API that you think will handle 100/s but the product takes off and you end up with 1,000,000/s, you don't have to do anything.
- edshiro 10y agoI think this is a great opportunity for back-end developers who lack full-stack skills or don't have a front-end sidekick to produce valuable software. Unfortunately, just like the app store, you would still suffer from discovery issues so the developer must also think about upping their marketing game. Very excited about this new development from Amazon though!
- dualogy 10y ago> Unfortunately, just like the app store, you would still suffer from discovery issues To some degree certainly quite likely, but personally I don't think it'd be as pronounced in such b2b / dev2dev contexts as it would be on today's b2c app stores, to the (hard to quantify/guesstimate) degree that users in the former more carefully scrutinize more offerings and contrast them with their actual requirements.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jakozaur 10y agoI believe convenience may be a huge argument for a lot of ppl. Paying to new provider takes a lot of resources, while using yet another AWS like api is easier.
- AndrewOMartin 10y agoIs there any guarantee in their terms that they're not going to check which API brings in the most cash, and make their own if it's any good? They might not need to know the specifics, just count hits. Then they could look at the public end of any seriously popular API.
- hyperpallium 10y agoIt seems inevitable, yet would kill the ecosystem. They may need to give a non-compete guarantee, of some kind... OTOH platform owners (eg MS, apple) have done this (aborbed others' applications as feaures) without apparent harm.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pavelmelnichuk 10y agoWhat is to stop them from counting your traffic now, if you use aws that is?
- tyingq 10y agoThey could, but wouldn't have the advantage of all the handy metadata this service provides to do it accurately, at scale.
- tyingq 10y agoNot sure if it's true, but that's a common complaint with 3rd party sellers on Amazon. Once AMZN spots a winner, they sell direct.
- shostack 10y agoAnd why wouldn't they? It clearly hasn't stopped sellers. Amazon has them do all the market research on their dime. Amazon then gets all the data to decide what to launch next to improve their margins, and they get paid for the privilege. I can't say I blame them, but I can't say it does much for my trust in them either.
- politician 10y agoTeams targeting this capability ought to consider how much specific information Amazon would be able to derive: utilization and revenue growth rates. We've seen platform providers crowd out existing solutions on their platforms when a particular product becomes popular -- Twitter, and their treatment of developers on it's platform, is a classic example. Through the lens of Twitter, AWS seems to be creating for itself the opportunity to benefit from this sort of third-party R&D on a massive scale.
- jpalomaki 10y agoOn the other hand, on Amazon scale you cat probably get pretty good idea about trending API services by just looking at the AWS DNS statistics (and/or some network level metrics) and Amazon Alexa stats.
- jononor 10y agoPopular does not neccesarily mean profitable though. If you can easily know whats profitable in the landscape, thats killer.
- tajen 10y ago"Accountant as a service. Free. Works worldwide. Select in which country you want to create your company: ..." would be a great value proposition for AWS startups ;) "We don't sell your data", it says, "we... only... use it internally."
- ajainy 10y agoOr use 3scale or WSO2? I understand, pricing point of view, amazon will be 10 times or more cheaper. But level of effort required and limited features set, you have to decide what you are trying to do with your time & skills.
- picsoung 10y ago3scale offers an integration with Amazon API Gateway, and we have the experience with billing of API usage. https://www.3scale.net/2015/10/new-aws-api-gateway-integration-with-3scale-api-management/ https://www.3scale.net/2015/10/new-aws-api-gateway-integrati...
- arielm 10y agoI think this is a great new addition to AWS. Amazon's pace of releasing new things is just astounding. As an API provider I'm pretty excited to find out how this works and whether the AWS marketplace is really ready for 3rd party services. Having tried mashape a couple of months ago I like the idea but found their implementation a bit cumbersome and confusing. I hope Amazon's approach will be simpler.
- maxekman 10y agoWould be interesting if they enabled integration with Ethereum for API monetizing. But that is probably unlikely as they would go against their own payment platform.
- orasis 10y agoThe "per request" model is seriously limiting. I work in the mobile app machine learning/analytics space and per Monthly Active User makes a lot more sense for that market.
- la6470 10y agoThe fact that the customer have to have an AWS account to buy from marketplace is limiting
- impostervt 10y agoI use Mashape for monetizing an API. They have great customer service, but it seems like their marketplace hasn't gotten a lot of love in the last few years. Instead they seem to be focused on other things, like Kong. I do however, think my customers prefer monthly plans instead of a strict per usage billing. It also helps me predict growth in advance.
- ciokan 10y agoSadly, that's the only marketplace around. I have about 5 APIs there and the activity is really low.
- stanmancan 10y agoThe API gateway seems quite expensive to me. I guess it has its use cases and mine doesn't fit into it. I run a free API www.macvendors.com that handles around 225 million requests per month. It's super simple and has no authentiction or anything, but I'm also able to run it on a $20/m VPS. Looks like API gateway would be $750+data. Bummer because the ecosystem around it looks great. You certainly pay for it though!
- lotyrin 10y agoIt's a steal for mediocre organizations where traditional development of even a simple proxy to some other AWS service would be a couple months' planning and launch late with show-stopping bugs, eating a couple man-months total before reaching stability and ultimately serving only a few thousand requests before getting shelved. In circumstances like these, I've estimated per-request costs of systems at tens of dollars.
- brilliantcode 10y agocurious to know your setup
- jamiesonbecker 10y agoFrom a load perspective, if the request pattern is even, 225 million req/month are only about 85 req/s (assuming ~730hrs/mo). Any $5/mo VPS running even a very heavy and suboptimal web framework can handle that. It's likely more spikey than that (i.e., peak/off-peak times), but certain server-to-server loads have a very consistent load pattern. (For example, at Userify[1] - SSH key management -- servers check for updates every 90 seconds or so or 10 seconds for premium plans or self hosted, so the load pattern is literally a flat line.. extremely predictable. We'll probably switch over clients that can handle it to websockets and maybe hashed etags and cut that load pattern into oblivion, but for now it works and is simple/auditable code/extremely reliable, which is a very important factor in our case.) To GP's point, spiraling costs are definitely a factor with most of Amazon's services such as DynamoDB and especially Lambda... they are sometimes an effective use of devtime, especially in the beginning of a project (and when dealing with a mature platform like DynamoDB and maybe not so much Lambda), but you have to carefully consider the cost factor as you scale. For example, Lambda is often literally several orders of magnitude[2] more expensive than an equivalent ELB. (i.e., it can be more than 100x more expensive.. for small scale or maintenance tasks, that may not matter.. for a heavy/core service, it definitely matters!) So, as they taught us in AWS SA, design for cost: use the more advanced services when it makes sense, but optimize across all axes, not just devtime. TL;DR: most cheap cloud instances can do 85req/s. 1. https://userify.com https://userify.com 2. https://twitter.com/JamiesonBecker/status/802185522139582464 https://twitter.com/JamiesonBecker/status/802185522139582464
- brilliantcode 10y agosounds like this will put the nail in mashape's coffin. not sure why this is downvoted, mashape's marketplace has been dead for quite some time, there are no buyers.
- niftich 10y agoThe 'API marketplace' and 'API economy' narratives are largely pushed by companies who make API proxies: Mashape, Mulesoft, etc. (EDIT: not Mashable, they're unrelated) I've yet to hear true success stories in this space; to me it just seems like wishful thinking (on part of the marketplace and on part of API developers) about a second app boom; notably, in the hype cycle, the API boom has largely been superseded by the Chatbot boom, which is functionally very similar, although the gatekeepers are different. That is not to say you can't make money this way. Perhaps it's useful for hobbyist-level projects, or cut-from-the-same-cloth wrapper APIs that hardly offer anything unique but at least one sucker signs up anyway -- the same as with apps, really. Is this actually a thriving market?
- sheraz 10y agoExactly this. It is like all those data marketplaces from 2010. Infochimps most famously and azure shuttering their data marketplace recently. This has the same feel.
- drvdevd 10y agoI can see how this market has a BS feel to it (and have noticed this too lately), but at least the general concept of "API" leaves a lot of room for interpretation... perhaps much more functionality can be exposed via an API on such a marketplace than could ever be offered by an "app", etc.
- sinzone 10y agotypo: MashaBLE is a blog and media property nothing related with APIs
- billconan 10y agoI read the api gateway document. I don't quite understand the use of it. in the end the traffic will be routed to my backend, I will still handle the requests myself. What's the benefit of using a gateway?
- euyyn 10y agoThe idea should be that you don't have to reinvent how to authenticate users (client developer and end user), apply different quotas, charge money, detect abuse, log any of that, nor a number of other things that are common to all APIs. Not sure how much of that does Amazon accomplish, nor to what success.
- Natsu 10y agoI don't know Amazon's solution, but an API Gateway in general helps you abstract public and private APIs from each other. You can change your internal processes without affecting your external APIs, in addition to not having to build authorization, monitoring, etc. into every API separately.
- intrasight 10y agoI've read all the docs, and I still don't see anything about AWS doing the monetization. What am I missing? Has someone else found this missing link? Billing is mentioned in two sentences: 1. "As I mentioned earlier, you can use Usage Plans to bill for usage and to create an ecosystem around your APIs." 2. "You can then process and analyze the data as desired. For example, you could bill your subscribers on a per-call basis." So I'm reading this as I am responsible for billing the customer.
- drvdevd 10y agoPerhaps if your API is already built on top of AWS, this counts? [edit] meaning youre already using their billing APIs in there somewhere
- Bombthecat 10y agoThis is huge. I work with datapower / API connect and Axway api-gateway / manager. This will definitely have an impact on my work. Time to learn a new tool :)
- dandare 10y agoExcuse my ignorance, can you tell me an example of a what kind of API would someone sell and someone else buy and why? I just don't understand what is the business model here. Thanks.
- troymc 10y agoAWS itself is a great example: Most Amazon Web Services (e.g. S3, EC2) can be controlled and accessed via APIs, and Amazon charges for that API access. Here's a more concrete example --- the pricing page for Amazon DynamoDB: https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/
- garysieling 10y agoAudio transcription
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- rdslw 10y agoI highly recommend visiting 21.co. They develop for some time technology to easily charge/collect/pay bitcoin on every HTTP request in the 21 Marketplace. They have cool (afaik opensource) technology using standard HTTP Response 402 "Payment Required" - yeah, there is such thing :) Nice initial set of demos and information: https://21.co/features/ https://21.co/features/ Disclaimer: I'm not author/founder/investor/bitcoin evangelist. I just like what they try to do.
- mitchoneill 10y agoI set up a quick "storage for btc charged per byte" server with it if anyone wants to play around/break it http://storage.mitch.fyi/ http://storage.mitch.fyi/ And then did a talk on the general concepts of paid endpoints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvJpWt5gapQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvJpWt5gapQ
- congerous 10y agoYeah right, until Amazon sees that you're succeeding and decides to monetize your APIs without you. Not a great partner.