For an API, or really any software, you have a large fixed development cost plus a small marginal cost per request. So the problem is that you have to price yo

For an API, or really any software, you have a large fixed development cost plus a small marginal cost per request. So the problem is that you have to price your usage high enough to cover the fixed cost. Depending on the usage that can be hundreds to thousands of times the marginal cost. Think of an address validation service. The cost to develop the service might amortize out to $0.50 a request while the infrastructure to run the service will cost a fraction of a penny per request. To make a profit the company would charge $0.75 an address. As a customer I might be willing to pay a dollar per address to validate a billing address. For addresses collected as part of a marketing campaign maybe it's only one cent. So there's a potential benefit from the service that isn't being realized due to the pricing. I deal with this all the time at my job. The vendor of the software I implement has been offering a fixed price per ticket/process* created. This pushes us to implement a single big process when combining a bunch of smaller processes into one bigger one is the better way to do it. It also limits the problems we can solve to those worth more than X dollars per process where X is the cost the vendor charges per process executed. *Stuff like credit card disputes or managing the employee onboarding process