Overview

Once you create and configure your APIs in API Gateway, you can create a monetization strategy for your APIs. API Gateway allows you to create packages and plans. As an API provider or API product manager, you can configure the packages and plans as per your organization requirements to monetize your APIs.

In a typical API Monetization solution, you have the following components:

API Gateway - You can create APIs, packages and plans and host them in API Gateway. In addition you can enforce quota and rate limits and monitor the API usage.

Billing solution - You can translate the APIs, Packages, and Plans are into billable products. You can perform customer information and billing related activities here, based on the usage quota.

API Portal - Here consumers find and subscribe to the API packages and plans.

You can create an end-to-end monetization experience by integrating these components.

Note:
With API Gateway 10.11, you can create subscription by using the Subscription REST API. For more details about this API, see Subscription Management.

API Gateway does not support billing solution. However, it provides the following extensions, which you can use to integrate with a billing system.

APIs to create, read, update, delete the APIs, packages, plans, and subscriptions.

Extensible model that enables extending meta data for packages, plans, and subscriptions to store additional (billing or consumer related) data.

Auditing and lifecycle - Provides support to track the changes to assets. You can use the Search API to retrieve the audit data or you can configure the audit data to be pushed to different destinations as and when there is a change. For more details about Search API, see API Gateway Search. For more details about custom destination, see Custom Destination.

Monitoring and notifications - API Gateway monitors the usage and transactions. APIs are available to retrieve the monitoring and transactions data or you can configure API Gateway to push this data to different destinations. Alerts can be configured to be sent to different destinations for different metrics. To learn more, see Transaction Data

Usage metrics - API Gateway provides APIs to retrieve the usage information per API or a subscription. You can use this data to determine the quota usage and for billing purposes.

Note:
To view usage metrics, you must either add log invocation policy to each API or use global policy to generate transaction events.

On the API Gateway to API Portal integration, API Gateway provides support for publishing APIs, packages and plans to API Portal and also provides support for creating subscriptions from the API Portal. Additionally, API Gateway pushes API transactions to API Portal.