I get it, you need to find revenue from APIs to justify the investment costs. Every customer I have seen with plans for Public APIs has a dream of monetizing them. However what is the real cost of monetization?

Full disclousure I work for IBM who are a rival to Google in the API Space, though I am not talking about Google’s API Enterprise prodcuts.

Here is a real usecase, I was working on a personal project where i needed to put a map on a dashboard. (See future upcoming projects). I went to Google, as Google Maps has been my goto for coming up twenty years. However in order to use the Google Maps API we now need to provide a credit card, and though I wasn’t going to go over the free tier I was not comfortable providing my credit card details. So they lost a home-hacker because of their need for a credit card.

I understanding that a need for a credit card is not only so they can bill me if I go over quota, but also so they can identify me. I dont like sharing my credit card details. Google is an established company and so they can take the risk of loosing me. However companies who are new to the API space, often require home-hackers to get established, to build up their offering and increase their usage. A pay wall or even requiring payment details to access a free tier will put people off.

For companies looking at driving revenue from APIs, I would consider both of the following approaches.

  1. Offer a free tier that can be access by sign up with an email, no more. But don’t have the free tier so limited that it cannot be used for personal projects. This free tier can be limited by calls per hour, or information detail. Many people say that home-hackers are the enterprise consumers of the future.

  2. Innovate your existing business strategies with the new ideas from the community. If someone comes up with a novel idea, partner with them to benefit.

By exposing APIs publicly you are allowing a new audience to come up with new ideas. These ideas have the potential to be multi million or even multi billion dollar revenue opportunities. However a paywall may block these ideas being formed, or worse they may use a competitor.

For those interested I used Microsoft Maps https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps for my home project.