Maximizing Your API’s Potential with DigitalAPICraft’s API Monetization: A Comprehensive Guide

Monetization refers to the process of generating revenue from an API by charging for its usage by external developers. Today, API monetization has become an important consideration for many enterprises as they look to generate revenue from their digital assets and improve their services. Revenue generation, competitive advantage, customer experience, innovation, ecosystem growth, and data monetization are a few standard reasons enterprises should go for API monetization.

In this post, we’ll be discussing DigitalAPICraft’s API monetization, why enterprises should opt for it, and much more.

API Monetization: A Quick?Overview

Businesses are increasingly adopting API monetization as a way to generate revenue and improve their services. Kong is a popular open-source API gateway and management platform that allows businesses to manage, secure, and scale their APIs and microservices.

We, at DigitalAPICraft, developed a customised monetization plugin in conjunction with an elastic search database. API data can be pushed to the elastic search database using this solution to generate analytics data and calculate API usage for external developers. In the next section, we will learn how this solution replaced the commercial Kong monetization plugin.

Monetization solution with Kong?Gateway

We’ve implemented Kong monetization for one of our clients. In our experience, Kong is an out-of-the-box open-source API gateway, that allows for customization as per the customer’s requirements.

1. Elastic search:?Kong’s open-source HTTP plugin is used to send the live API data to the elastic search database. This enables enterprises to gain insights into their API usage patterns and make data-driven decisions around their API strategy. The Kong and Elastic search integration provides a flexible and scalable solution for logging and analyzing API traffic, allowing organizations to make informed decisions about how to optimize their API offerings. In a nutshell, the custom solution with the Kong API gateway and Elasticsearch offers enterprises a powerful tool for analyzing and optimizing their API usage, enabling them to improve the performance, security, and reliability of their APIs.
2. Live Data:?The analytics data presented by any API gateway has a minimum delay of 3 minutes. Because data is pushed in real time, elastic search API analytics are almost real time, and developers can get API live usage.

How does DAC integrate Marketplace with?Kong?

Marketplace is a DAC-provided user interface for managing an enterprise’s developer ecosystem. Kong API gateway can be configured with DAC Marketplace via simple admin configuration.

DigitalAPICraft has integrated the Marketplace with Kong Connectivity. Following are the steps for Marketplace integration with Kong.

1. When a developer account is added to the marketplace, a “Kong consumer” (an alias name used in the Kong API gateway) is formed.
2. The Kong gateway is used to create the developer app.Following the creation of the app, the developer is given access to the consumer key and the secret.
3. A?Kong rate-limiting?plugin is added to limit API usage against the API service in accordance with the plan price when a developer selects an API subscription plan from a catalog. For instance, the developer selects a plan that costs $0.50 per API and allows 10,000 API requests per month. As a result, that API service now has a rate-limiting plugin with a monthly cap of 10,000.
4. Elastic Search Aggregate API is used to calculate data for developer API usage.

Why choose DAC’s Kong Monetization over Traditional Kong Monetization?

Here are a few critical factors that help you understand why you should go for a customised API monetization for your marketplace over a traditional one.

1. In order to enable monetization, analytics from the API gateway layer are required to determine the API consumption over time. Kong open source does not support the Analytics API; only logging to the local file system or external logging servers via the HTTP or TCP protocol is supported.
2. API monetization by DigitalAPICraft is not reliant on any licenses. Standard Kong Monetization is a commercial product that must be licenced in order to be used. The licence type and cost may vary based on the specific features and capabilities that you need. To use Kong Monetization, you will need to purchase a licence from Kong Inc. or one of their authorised resellers. It’s important to note that Kong Monetization is not part of the open-source Kong API Gateway, and a separate licence is required even if you are using the open-source version of Kong. If you need more information on licencing options and pricing, you can contact Kong Inc. directly or visit their website for more details.
3. Enterprises will get more flexibility and control with DAC’s Kong Monetization, as it allows you to create custom monetization plans and pricing models.
4. It also allows you to create custom rate-limiting rules, offer usage-based pricing, and create tiered pricing models based on specific usage criteria. Whereas, traditional Kong monetization provides a simple and straightforward way to monetize APIs by allowing you to set rate limits and charge for usage based on a set of predefined rules.

In summary, customised Kong monetization provides more control and flexibility in terms of how you monetize your APIs, while traditional Kong monetization provides a simple and straightforward approach to monetizing your APIs.

Conclusion

API monetization has become an important trend in the API industry as businesses look to generate revenue from their digital assets and improve their services. With DigitalAPICraft’s API Monetization, enterprises can manage, secure, and scale their APIs, while also setting up usage plans and charging customers for access to specific API features and services.

There are several different strategies and models for API monetization, and the best approach for a given enterprise will depend on its goals, target market, and API offerings. Regardless of the specific approach, API monetization offers a range of benefits for enterprises, including new revenue streams, improved customer experiences, and opportunities for innovation and ecosystem growth. To know more about customized Kong Monetization,?get in touch?with our experts.