Hi,
I’m researching api gateways for a project that I’m working on, and one thing I’m hung up on is the monetization piece. We’re looking to charge per API access, based on the user credentials plus headers. But many of the analytics tools available seem to go for reliability of analytics over accuracy. Are Tyk’s traffic analytics accurate enough to base billing on? And if not, is there an existing monetization plugin for Tyk that would accomplish the same thing?
Thanks.
Hey @mdalen welcome to our community and thanks for your interest.
Our Docs here: //tyk.io/docs/tyk-developer-portal/tyk-portal-classic/monetise/ discuss our approach in general.
There are many ways you can use Tyk to monetise your APIs. Basing monetisation on Analytics is one approach and our analytics are very accurate.
Alternatively, how we normally achieve this would be via individual developer keys which can be assigned policies based on rate limiting and quota management.
i.e. you would set policies based on say, bronze, silver and gold usage tiers. As a customer requests a key, they are redirected to your payment portal to pay and then are issued a key attached to the appropriate policy.
If you want to bill after the fact this is also possible but is most easily achieved by tracking use by keys although other methods could be employed based on your use case.
Hope this helps.
Gregor
Thanks for the reply. In our use case, several billing clients may be using a single set of keys, and for some users we will have to base billing on the user’s group membership or even certain custom headers. I’m not certain your billing policies would be flexible enough to support our model.
Generally speaking the API gateway is used to aggregate all of these different access methods and simplify the model. It is possible to achieve what you have stated using the Tyk gateways, it would just require a bit more inspection and reporting. This could be achieved with custom middleware or an external log/analytics system.