Monetizing your Products

In addition to offering free Plans for your customers to use your Products, you can also define Plans that automatically bill your customers who are using your Products in IBM® API Connect.

API Connect includes a subscription billing feature that allows API providers to define pricing Plans in their API Products, and monetize their API offerings. If a Product contains a pricing Plan, API consumers must enter their payment information into the Developer Portal before they can subscribe to that Plan.

API Connect supports integration with Stripe Subscription Billing, an independent cloud service that manages monetized product Plans, customers, their payment information, and their subscription history, in order to generate monthly invoices and charge customers automatically. With this integration, Stripe serves as both the subscription billing system and the payment processing system.

You can define both free Plans and paid Plans within the same Product. To charge your customers more for greater access to your APIs, you can create multiple Plans with different tiers of prices and rate-limits. For example, an introductory Plan might have a low monthly price and restrictive rate-limiting, while a higher tier Plan might couple a higher monthly price with less restrictive rate limiting controls. Your customers can then select the Plan that is appropriate for their usage rates. As your customers have different needs for the use of your Products, so you can offer different levels of service. For example, a smaller customer might need a rate of only 5 API calls per hour, whereas a larger company might need a rate of 1000 API calls per hour. You can create the Plans that are appropriate for your customers, and they can subscribe to the service and pricing Plan that is appropriate for them.

Restriction: The following limitations apply to the subscription billing feature:

Billing and monetization requirements vary by country, where IBM and the independent cloud billing provider, Stripe, cannot guarantee every country requirement is supported. Country requirements change, and are out of scope for this document. Some limitations on storing and passing fields to the Stripe billing provider might exist, when fields are unique to a subset of countries. For example, the passing of a billing address from API Connect to Stripe, which is required by some EU countries due to GDPR and taxation laws, is not currently supported.
Two data center disaster recovery configurations including the optional billing microservice are not supported at this time.
After a configured billing resource is in use by a Catalog, it might not be possible to remove it. Do not add your Stripe test keys to production Catalogs. If you want to prototype with your non-production Stripe keys, create a separate temporary Catalog.
If an API consumer deletes their payment method, or their credit card expires, or their card is out of credit after they have initially subscribed and prepaid for their first month, there is no mechanism to alert the provider organization or suspend API access automatically in response. Provider organizations can monitor their Stripe dashboards for non-payment events and, if necessary, notify the consumer, suspend the application for that subscription, or cancel the API Connect subscription manually. The URL of the API Connect subscription is saved in the metadata of the Stripe subscription object, to assist in reverse lookups.
Suspending an application does not automatically pause the billing cycles of the subscriptions for that application.
You can republish a Product that includes billing only when the Catalog Production mode is set to On.

Though much of the procedure is the same for setting up a paid Plan and a free Plan, there are some extra actions that are needed before you can start defining paid Plans. See the following topics for more information:

First, you must configure a billing integration resource for your provider organization; see Adding a billing integration resource.
Before you can publish a Product Plan with pricing to a Catalog, you must add your billing integration resource to that Catalog; see Adding a billing integration resource to a Catalog.
Also before you can publish to a Catalog, an administrator must enable the Stripe payment method module in the Developer Portal for that Catalog; see Configuring Stripe in the Developer Portal.
After the Catalog and Developer Portal are configured, you can create Products that include pricing Plans; see Defining a Product with billing integration.

Note:

You can also create and manage billing integration resources by using the developer toolkit CLI. For more information, see the toolkit CLI reference documentation.