Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

Why none of these API gateways offer monetization out of the box? I'm curious. Is that a not well-demanded feature?

I have researched a lot of them and none have a straight way to do metered billing and if they somehow do, they are prohibitively expensive.

Does somebody know of an API gateway solution that offers this?

View on HN

Billing is a hard issue since there is no common API to do that. All payment gateways are different. And what is most important, it lot of cases it requires some application logic, on how exactly you want to bill the user: for example partly static, partly dynamic.

What API gateway can do, is to provide you with a way to set a quota for a given user, track analytics, and have it all accessed in a programmatic way, so with a few API queries, you can know how much to bill the user. At least that's how most of the Gateways, like Tyk, do.

I think key issue here is that legacy api management solutions lock you into their billing flows and providers. An open SRC gateway like Tyk will give you freedom to use your own billing solution and define your own verticals at expense of slightly more complexity at integration/implementation.

Apigee has some monetization features... https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/monetization/basics-mon...

They do, but it's $500 USD per month for the most basic plan. I'm looking for something that can start small and scale as needed.

In the same boat. I think you can do something with API Gateway + API Marketplace but I would LOVE a plugin to Kong or any other OS software...even if it would support just one gateway.

$500 for Apigee makes it untouchable for small startups. Another one worth looking into might be at IBM bluemix.

Axway api management might be another alternative.

a stripe 'plugin' would be great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com