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It's difficult to summarise the key lessons but you need to consider things like:
* What does having an API allow your customers to do?
* How valuable is that?
* Are they willing to pay for it?
* How do you align payment to the value?
* Is an API considered "table stakes?"
The book I linked goes into more detail so I really encourage you to read it. You can skip over the organisational changes it recommends, just the principles of pricing are good enough for your use case.
It is my data - if I am paying for a service already the idea of paying more to access my data differently is unattractive.
If you're using the API yourself it means the cost of building is complete so there is no additional cost.
How often are the users, power users, abusers going to access the API?
I am thinking either charge more for your service and include it and add rate limiting, authentication, 2FA, etc to add some friction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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A whole lot of people commenting on HN suffer from that sickness.
The answers to the questions I suggested help decide whether it's driven by creating value for customers or yet another manifestation of the parasitic "extraction" mentality (aforementioned "sickness").
I even quoted the part to which I was responding, yeah?
Yeah.
a) Your business model Is the API your primary source of revenue? Something you'd be willing to lose money on in order to drive revenue somewhere else? You need to think about how it fits into the overall strategy of your business.
b) Your costs How much will this API cost you to setup, operate, and maintain? You need to think about how much you'll make/lose at different price structures and different volumes.
c) How the customer will use it Will they be looking to make 1 query a year? A million an hour? Probably somewhere inbetween of course, but that will make a big difference in terms of how to price it.
d) How much value does the customer get If using this API saves the customer $1 million in costs, you should make sure they are paying you at least $100k. If it saves them $10 in costs, make sure you aren't charging them more than $10. And again, you need to think about how much they are going to pay in total, thinking about how many calls they are making of the course of a day/month/year/etc.
... I'm sure I'm missing some. But the point really is, there is no right answer unless you think carefully about your product, customers, and strategy.
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I'll repeat it: just looking for ways to charge people is a sickness. A whole lot of people commenting on HN suffer from that sickness. The answers to the questions I suggested help decide whether it's driven by creating value for customers or yet another manifestation of the parasitic "extraction" mentality (aforementioned "sickness"). I even quoted the part to which I was responding, yeah? Yeah.