Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#51

Post by gtirloni » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #43

Without more detail I would respond as a customer and builder: 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 i…

> If you're using the API yourself it means the cost of building is complete

Opening up an internal API with a know client that you own to the whole world introduces more complexity around authentication, rate limiting, traffic inspection, etc, that OP probably doesn't need to worry about now.

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#52

Post by sokoloff » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

siva7 wrote: post #40

Depends 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).

Do you block your engineers from using S3 or other cloud services?

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#53

Post by nagstler » Tue, Mar 12, 2024, 10:16 PM UTC

Meter based pricing works well if that is your main stream pricing model. If you are charging a subscription fee, then you should consider including a certain number of API calls in the subscription bundle. for API gateway products like AWS API gateway, tyk and otehrs, the API request based pricing is main stream. If you think API call on your platform is part of the core value, then you should consider including it in the subscription fee. If you think API call is a value added service, then you should consider charging it separately.

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#54

Post by pknerd » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 1:23 AM UTC

mateuszbuda wrote: post #9

To give you a reference point, at https://scrapingfish.com/ we charge $0.002 per API call but in our case, the API call gives you the value by itself: access to mobile proxies and cluster of browsers. For you, I would recommend to either give the API access for free as I assume users already pay for the product. Another option would be to include API access only to higher plan users who pay more and this could be an…

How is scraping fish different from a million other services?

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#55

Post by muzani » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:37 AM UTC

pknerd wrote: post #54

mateuszbuda wrote: post #9

To give you a reference point, at https://scrapingfish.com/ we charge $0.002 per API call but in our case, the API call gives you the value by itself: access to mobile proxies and cluster of browsers. For you, I would recommend to either give the API access for free as I assume users already pay for the product. Another option would be to include API access only to higher plan users who pay more and this could be an…

How is scraping fish different from a million other services?

When there's a million other services, they don't have to be different. It's like VPNs or burgers. It just has to work and not be too expensive.

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#56

Post by barfbagginus » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 5:44 AM UTC

orochimaaru wrote: post #31

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.

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#57

Post by JustSteveKing » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 9:24 AM UTC

This shouldn't be charged per API call, you should look at an average of API calls per person - and create a figure 20% above that of what you want to earn.

Alternatively, charge x per month - with a cap of a certain amount of API calls.

The problem with charging per API call is that what do you class as an API call? What happens if a network degrades and the response hangs? Should the end user pay for this? What if they get a 404, or a 401/403? Should they be charged for these?

As your application stores customer data that they own, I could price based on how many records they are storing - not how often they want to access their own data.

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#58

Post by mateuszbuda » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 10:16 AM UTC

pknerd wrote: post #54

mateuszbuda wrote: post #9

To give you a reference point, at https://scrapingfish.com/ we charge $0.002 per API call but in our case, the API call gives you the value by itself: access to mobile proxies and cluster of browsers. For you, I would recommend to either give the API access for free as I assume users already pay for the product. Another option would be to include API access only to higher plan users who pay more and this could be an…

How is scraping fish different from a million other services?

Two main differentiators. 1. Pricing. We charge for requests and the cost of each successful request is the same as opposed to misleading API credits system used by others. Also, we sell request pack which are valid up to 1 year as opposed to monthly plans with expiring unused API credits. 2. We use our own high quality and ethically sourced mobile proxies as opposed to shared pools from large proxy providers (https://scrapingfish.com/how-ips-for-web-scraping-are-source...).

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#59

Post by redditor98654 » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 11:38 AM UTC

I have done pricing for multiple AWS services and while many people may be against the per-call pricing model of AWS, I would recommend you do a detailed costing of your service first.

Start with initial assumptions, like amount of customer data eat and then base your calculations on how much data is being requested. You will also get a deep understanding of how your system scales and where the cost really lies. For example, even for a simple crud app running in AWS, you can pretty detailed on your costing. Like how much IO you will consume from RDS per million queries etc.

That will tell you what your margins can be.

Re: Ask HN: How much to charge for an API call?

#60

Post by buffet_overflow » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 1:42 PM UTC

orochimaaru wrote: post #31

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.

If OP takes this approach, please please please make this usage data easily accessible, ideally both as a (free?) API endpoint and as a timechart/table in the web UI if applicable.