Monetize your APIs in AWS Marketplace using API Gateway

Shiva Krishnamurthy, Sr. Product Manager

Amazon API Gateway helps you quickly build highly scalable, secure, and robust APIs. Today, we are announcing an integration of API Gateway with AWS Marketplace. You can now easily monetize your APIs built with API Gateway, market them directly to AWS customers, and reuse AWS bill calculation and collection mechanisms.

AWS Marketplace lists over 3,500 software listings across 35 product categories with over 100K active customers. With the recent announcement of SaaS Subscriptions, API sellers can, for the first time, take advantage of the full suite of Marketplace features, including customer acquisition, unified billing, and reporting. For AWS customers, this means that they can now subscribe to API products through AWS Marketplace and pay on an existing AWS bill. This gives you direct access to the AWS customer base.

To get started, identify the API on API Gateway that you want to sell on AWS Marketplace. Next, package that API into usage plans. Usage plans allow you to set throttling limits and quotas to your APIs and allow you to control third-party usage of your API. You can create multiple usage plans with different limits (e.g., Silver, Gold, Platinum) and offer them as different API products on AWS Marketplace.

Let’s suppose that you offer a Pet Store API managed by API Gateway and you want to start selling it through AWS Marketplace: you must offer a developer portal, a website that you must maintain that allows new customers to register an account using AWS-provided billing identifiers. Also, the portal needs to provide registered customers with access to your APIs during and after purchase.

To help you get started, we have created a reference implementation of a developer portal application. You can use this implementation to create a developer portal from scratch, or use it as a reference guide to integrate API Gateway into an existing developer portal that you already operate. For a detailed walkthrough on setting up a developer portal using our reference application, see (Generate Your Own API Gateway Developer Portal).

After you have set up your developer portal, register as a seller with the AWS Marketplace. After registration, submit a product load form to list your product for sale. In this step, you describe your API product, define pricing, and submit AWS account IDs to be used to test the subscription. You also submit the URL of your developer portal. Currently, API Gateway only supports “per request” pricing models.

After you have registered as a seller, you are given an AWS Marketplace product code. Log in to the API Gateway console to associate this product code with the corresponding usage plan on API Gateway. This tells API Gateway to send telemetry records to AWS Marketplace when your API is used.

After the product code is associated, test the “end user” flow by subscribing to your API products using the AWS IDs that you submitted via the Marketplace; verify the proper functionality. When you’ve finished verifying, submit your product for final approval using instructions provided in the Seller Guide.

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