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Making Sure The Latest API Pricing Update Is Available In A Developer Portal Messaging Area

I am spending a significant amount of time looking through the pricing pages for leading API providers, working to get a sense for some of the common approaches to API monetization in use across the space. Along the way I am finding some simple approaches from API providers that I wanted to share as bit-size API planning stories here on the blog.

After recently landing on the pricing page for identity service provider Auth0, I saw that they included a simple message and link to the latest blog post about API pricing changes. It is a simple, subtle, yet very prominent approach to making sure your API consumers are aware of pricing changes that may impact their integration. I recently wrote about providing a messaging area to reach developers upon platform login, but this approach from Auth0 is about providing relevant messaging no matter where you are at in the developer portal--not just at login.

Couple of lessons for me, extracted from this approach:

  1. Prominent FMA - Providing a prominently placed, flexible messaging area, can help make sure your API consumers stay up to speed on the latest, when it comes to platform operations. 
  2. Pricing Storytelling - Telling the story around each change in pricing is a critical aspect of operation. Publishing a story on your blog, syndicating out through your social channels, and prominent placement via a FMA is key.

This help rekenforce the fact that we should make sure to regularly communicating out our decisions around API monetization. Also making sure there is a saturation factor to our messaging, and that it is available via our blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other relevant page or channel used to reach API consumers.

I have a whole list of bit-size API monetization, pricing, and planning stories queued up. I will try to space them out, alongside other stories, but you will just have to suffer a little as I spend time expanding on my API monetization, and API plans research areas.