
Monetize Your APIs in AWS Marketplace Using API Gateway - axelfontaine
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/monetize-your-apis-in-aws-marketplace-using-api-gateway/
======
niftich
The '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been superseded by the Chatbot boom, which is functionally very similar,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?

~~~
bjacobel
There was a subthread on HN not too long ago from a guy who quit his day job
to scale ipinfo.io, which sells an API subscription product for geoIP lookups.
He's doing fairly well.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328971)

So I think there is a market for services like this, especially since API
Gateway takes away a lot of the kinds of scaling headaches the creator talks
about in the linked post.

~~~
dirtyaura
I'd say that ipinfo.io sells data, just through an API. Building a data set is
expensive and takes time.

Pure API plays are harder, I think.

------
osullivj
Need 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_-
_Se...](http://awsmp-loadforms.s3.amazonaws.com/AWS_Marketplace_-
_Seller_Guide.pdf)

~~~
GordonS
Sorry, what does AMI stand for?

~~~
erickt
Amazon 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)

------
slackoverflower
Despite 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

~~~
dismantlethesun
Amazon's store frontend interfaces are A/B tested. Their backend stuff for
developers---not so much.

The look and feel of the Amazon store looks 'web 1.0' because it has high
information density, and less white space. Current web fashion is to have
minimalist design with lots of white space, but that fashion not UX.

As a UX example, Amazon's store follows pretty standard practices---tables for
tabular data, cards for related items that will be skimmed, vertical scrolling
to support long item lists without changing the layout on browser resolution,
consistent sizing/spacing/coloring for headers, control locality so clicking a
button changes information near by it.

It does all of the things you'd expect a regular web app to do, but sprays it
over a long-form page instead of burying it in tabs increasing scroll distance
via whitespace.

Where Amazon fails is niches. Their interface is generalist, so they don't
have great UX for buying clothes, or buying groceries (albeit no one really
has a great interface for that).

~~~
joshuak
Minimalist design is not even remotely about fashion. At least not as applied
to UX and conversion flow. It's about intuition vs cognition. Amazon is blind
to how extraordinarily bad their UI is probably because they are putting too
much value into A/B testing and/or leadership has a belief that "everything at
once" is some how more helpful to users then a directed flow.

A/B testing is a very useful tool for a very constrained problem of comparing
two or more alternatives of the same thing. It cannot tell you which overall
UX approach is more effective. Good minimalist design is about creating user
flow which often consists of multiple simple steps. Each step avoiding
cognitive overload by maintaining a context and limiting the current scope.

Actually these multiple steps happen on complex pages too. The difference is
that on complex pages the user gets no help from the UX to accomplish their
goal. It needn't be fashionable, it needs to be functional not in the
theoretical sense, but in the actual sense accounting for real user behavior.

Amazon and people who mistakenly believe that "information density" is
necessarily good, often not true, and that a "lot of words" == "information
density" which is also often not true fail to realize that following a link or
scrolling a pages is actually _less_ difficult then visually searching a
cluttered information scape.

Even users who do not become frustrated by the UI will 'pre-filter' it once
they figure out how to do the one thing they want. This has the effect of
making most of the interface invisible to then from that point on. It's like
driving to work, they will tune out all the visual noise around them after the
first few trips. So at best the information density has no value because it is
ignored, and at worst, it's adding a heavy friction to conversion.

It's bad, pre design 101 bad. Amazon only gets away with it because they
already won the market long ago.

------
stanmancan
The 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!

~~~
brilliantcode
curious to know your setup

~~~
jamiesonbecker
From 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
hmm interesting. I guess I haven't really thought of this from cost point of
view. It is nice knowing that I can have a Flask endpoint up on AWS Lambda +
API Gateway that can scale using only my credit card. That peace of mind, once
you write a code you won't have to worry about scaling seems like a pretty
good deal and should carry a premium.

I'd be happy to have 85req/s hopefully by then I'd be charging lot of money.

~~~
jamiesonbecker
Exactly - and don't forget about things like Elastic Beanstalk as you grow.
Those automate even the setup of things like the ELB/ALB etc, trading a higher
fixed monthly cost for a lower cost per transaction. Still, if your business
model supports it and if it ain't broke, just leave it where it is... AWS does
give you many good choices.

~~~
brilliantcode
I just begun to look at ELB and curious to know how it's able to scale my php
app straight out of the box.

Having said that it's a struggle to figure out how to get Laravel running on
ELB

------
politician
Teams 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
On 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
Popular does not neccesarily mean profitable though. If you can easily know
whats profitable in the landscape, thats killer.

~~~
tajen
"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."

------
impostervt
I 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
Sadly, that's the only marketplace around. I have about 5 APIs there and the
activity is really low.

------
AndrewOMartin
Is 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.

~~~
tyingq
Not 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
And 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.

------
edshiro
I 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
> 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.

------
rdslw
I 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
I 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)

------
arielm
I 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.

------
orasis
The "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.

------
scrollaway
"01 DEC 2016" was this just announced or was it actually announced last month?

------
ajainy
Or 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
3scale 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-
integrati...](https://www.3scale.net/2015/10/new-aws-api-gateway-integration-
with-3scale-api-management/)

------
dandare
Excuse 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
AWS 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/)

------
maxekman
Would 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.

------
MichaelBurge
What 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
Not having to deal with Paypal seems to be a plus

------
LeicaLatte
Mashape does a good job of this but Amazon can take this to another level.

~~~
sapeien
Fun fact: Jeff Bezos from Amazon was an early investor in Mashape :)

~~~
shostack
So did he just invest to get info to decide whether to launch a competing
product?

------
Bombthecat
This 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 :)

------
billconan
I 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
The 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.

------
intrasight
I'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
Perhaps if your API is already built on top of AWS, this counts?

[edit] meaning youre already using _their_ billing APIs in there somewhere

------
davnicwil
What I'd like to know is: if you call an API you didn't pay for, will a 402 be
returned? ;-)

~~~
tzm
For posterity: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/api-
reference/handling...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/api-
reference/handling-errors/#api-error-codes)

------
weavie
I'm not sure I really understand the pet store example given. What are some
actual examples of this that people would actually use?

~~~
philliphaydon
Maxmind does geo ip lookup, you pay for the number of queries you issue.

That sort of thing I would assume.

~~~
cm2187
Also sending text messages, xml-whois api, etc...

------
congerous
Yeah right, until Amazon sees that you're succeeding and decides to monetize
your APIs without you. Not a great partner.

------
anilgulecha
The 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.

------
jakozaur
I 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.

------
patrizz
These aws guys are literally putting the pieces together while we're watching.

This is something I'll definitely will give a try.

------
brilliantcode
sounds 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.

