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You missed providing enough data to come up with something that would actually make revenue for you. Abstracting from a business model you have, there are SaaS businesses that don't charge for API call but a license fee that compensates the costs.
Valuing an API call is hard, first you need to discover your costs related to handling that call at all, those fall into 2 groups: 1. direct costs - this one is relatively easy, you just keep track of all your spending that you need to cover to handle that API calls, this will be mostly: compute, storage, network costs, software licences, 3rd party software licences. You should have a good idea how much you need to spend on infra to handle 1kk API calls. There is a caveat here (!) increasing storage costs that grow every month. Lets say you save a transaction in DB for every API call made and you charged a customer for that. The thing is that (depending on your agreement with the customer) you have to keep that transaction in DB for lets say next 36 month. If you're handling millions of transactions... these numbers add up and you set set yourself in a very uncomfortable position after some time when you realize that even though you charge per API call, it's not enough to cover the costs of keeping data in DB that grows every month. 2. indirect costs - Depending you your business setup, you may need to incur office costs, backoffice staff, sales commission, SWE team compensation, on-calls... payment gateway commission, taxes and FX rates fluctuations if you're charging globally in different currencies. The bigger the org the harder it will be to know all of these indirect costs. Btw. these costs are usually flat and there is not much linear dependency on the number of API calls you do (but there is to the number of customer you have). Where it gets interesting, is when you enter economies of scale... which means that you can keep your indirect costs relatively flat and your direct costs in a non-linear relation to the number of API calls made. To put into an example: - tiny scale, 1kk API calls will have 100USD of direct costs + 10k USD of indirect costs = price per 1k calls is (10100 USD / 1 000) = 10,1USD - a bit bigger scale, 100kk API calls will have 15000USD of direct costs + 10k USD of indirect costs = price per 1k calls is (25k USD / 100k ) = 0,025USD see? You've handled 100x more traffic but your direct costs increased only by 15x and indirect stayed the same - this is what you should focus on in the end when building API SaaS product - how do I get into economy of scale the fastest. |