Please don’t charge per call. It’s irritating. Charge for a block of calls or better still a block of calls in a moving time window. This way prospective clients don’t have to go ahead and estimate their entire design before using your product. A block (eg 100k calls every 24 hrs) gives them an easy way of balloarking their costs as well.
Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#32Your cost plus 20%
You are worth more than that!
That's impossible to determine because the units don't match.
Your market worth is your labor and skill, almost totally separate for how much you pay your robots. Low margin x high scale is as good as high margin x low scale. High margin at high scale doesn't exist outside a monopoly.
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#33[flagged]
exposing API gives customers flexibility to build their own tailored interface to your service rather than being stuck with your sometimes shitty interface.
I like the analogy of a restaurant. API is sort of like takeout order, here is your food packed in a bag now do whatever with it. Not having a takeout option means customers are stuck with whatever service you provide in the restaurant.
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#34You should not charge people just to access their own data. That's abusive. Charge only for extreme usage, like poorly written sync programs, maybe, maybe for realtime synchronization. Let them access their data so they are comfortable using your product more, and charge them for the value your product gives them.
You absolutely should charge people for access to their data. What do you think paying for s3 retrievals or db queries are?
Not the same thing at all. db queries are a computation service. S3 is literally renting storage, not an app.
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#35[flagged]
It's not a sickness to put a value on a product or service. A public API is going to incur additional testing, documentation, and support. Charge accordingly.
Will it? The API is presumably already used by the front end. If the API is being consumed, it’s safe to say the front end will be consumed less, hence equalizing the support costs. Plus, rendering a front end requires calls to get data the user might not want at the moment, whereas an API can provide fine tuned access to only the needed data, hence potentially saving money.
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#36Please don’t charge per call. It’s irritating. Charge for a block of calls or better still a block of calls in a moving time window. This way prospective clients don’t have to go ahead and estimate their entire design before using your product. A block (eg 100k calls every 24 hrs) gives them an easy way of balloarking their costs as well.
And segmenting the users: no API access needed no extra cost, low API calls needed (still free tier but with limited quota - useful for you to know and to talk to them) and the big users with said block of prepaid calls (pass them through the free API tier first with a grace period).
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#37You should not charge people just to access their own data. That's abusive. Charge only for extreme usage, like poorly written sync programs, maybe, maybe for realtime synchronization. Let them access their data so they are comfortable using your product more, and charge them for the value your product gives them.
Abusive? I know that HN has a very pro FOSS culture, which, with some users, seems to extend to the expectation that companies and products should exist out of the goodness of developers’ hearts. But charging willing users for an API that costs money to maintain is “abusive”?
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#38[flagged]
What a ridiculous comment. He’s running a business, not a charity. He’s already determined that this offering will be useful to customers. He’s asking for insights on what to charge. Nothing wrong with that.
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#39You should not charge people just to access their own data. That's abusive. Charge only for extreme usage, like poorly written sync programs, maybe, maybe for realtime synchronization. Let them access their data so they are comfortable using your product more, and charge them for the value your product gives them.
You absolutely should charge people for access to their data. What do you think paying for s3 retrievals or db queries are?
But s3 retrievals cost money regardless of if you use the API or something else. You don't pay extra you use the browser vs uploading through their UI (not that anyone uses their UI).
Charging users to use an API when you don't charge them to use the website is _pretty bad_. If it's B2B, they might just suck it up and pay. But if it's B2C, don't be surprised if someone makes an "unofficial API" that's free.
Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?
#40Depends on who your customers are. If their customers are strictly other businesses, you should set a base rate limit which is already included in the base fee and only pass the technical costs when the limit is exceeded. In other cases, charging per API call won't work because no business owner likes such unpredictable cost centers anyway (i wouldn't permit my engineers using such a service).