Ask HN: API Licensing Deal Tips

[b0k]

Our startup both provides and consumes commercial API's. We and most of the API's we integrate with charge based on requests, or a fixed monthly cost plus requests. One of the partners i'm currently negotiating only have a handful of customers and do a bespoke deal with each integrator.

They want us to pay a large monthly fee from day 1 which would include development/integration time. They aren't setup to charge on a hits basis and it doesn't really work for their data either. They want to do a more "traditional" style of license and they have a sales person who I assume is being paid a commission.

What could we propose as a licensing structure when you don't know what the start date would be for us going live, nor do we know how we're going to be using it yet? Taking into account