How to Promote and Market your API: API Marketplaces

by Adrian Machado

What is an API Marketplace? Should I list my API on an API Marketplace? Which API Marketplace should I choose?

There's a lot of confusion around the term "API Marketplace". In this post, I seek to clarify what an API marketplace is, if listing your API on a marketplace is a good idea, and which offerings you should consider.

What is an API Marketplace?#

An API Marketplace is a platform where you can discover, purchase, and integrate with APIs. This differs from API Directories, which only facilitate the discovery of APIs. For users looking to find an API to solve their problems, API Marketplaces provide an easy interface to learn about different APIs, test them out, subscribe, and view analytics about usage across multiple subscribed APIs. For API developers, API Marketplaces provide a method of getting your API in front of potential customers, and they often handle hard problems like user/subscription management, displaying analytics, quotas/rate-limits, billing, and more. For this service, API Marketplaces typically charge a % of subscription revenue.

One thing to note is that Integration Platforms (ex. Zapier) are not exactly the same as API marketplaces - but they play a similar role.

Should I List My API on an API Marketplace?#

I think listing on an API Marketplace is a short-sighted decision with long-term ramifications. Here's 5 reasons why you should NOT list your API on an API marketplace:

1. Duplicative Work: Listing on an API Marketplace already requires marketing work upfront; making a nice listing with a sensible pricing scheme, good quality docs, and a beautiful landing page. But these are all things you would need to do anyways, had you not gone for a marketplace approach. Sure, the delivery time on these might be sped up by the marketplace - but you lose content personalization
2. Kicking the Can Down the Road: At some point, if you want to scale your API into a real business, you will have to outgrow the user base of the marketplace you are listed in. That means doing all the marketing work you've been putting off, but now you have to manage both your own marketing strategy and continue to maintain your API Marketplace listing
3. High Fees: API Marketplaces often charge exorbitant fees, typically through a revenue-sharing model. This will directly eat into your margins, which you will either need to stomach yourself (lower profits) or pass on to your customers (higher prices, fewer customers). If your API becomes popular, you will be paying far more for the marketplace than you would for a standalone monetization system like Zuplo's monetization or Moesif
4. Lock-in: Once you start getting most of your revenue from an API Marketplace - you are locked in. They control your connection with your customers, your subscriptions and analytics data, and when and how much you get paid. They could raise their fees or do anything else to screw you over, but you can't leave without seriously churning your customer base.
5. Inflexibility: Marketplaces often only offer the bare minimum support for different pricing plans. They are usually not programmable, so you must conform to "their way" of charging for your API.

Enjoying this blog so far? It's part of our full guide on API Promotion and Marketing strategies. Check it out

I Understand the Risk, What're my Options?#

If you're just looking to make money with minimal time investment, API Marketplaces might still be right for you. Here's a list of all the API Marketplaces I could find, with information on if each marketplace might be right for you.

RapidAPI#

• Rapid is likely the most popular and well-known API Marketplace globally, with tens of thousands of APIs listed. You can easily list your API on RapidAPI (just upload your OpenAPI), and their UI makes building API products and pricing models simple.
• Benefits: RapidAPI likely has the most users of any API hub, so you have the largest pool of developers to tap into with your API. They provide quite a bit of tooling around productization, monetization, community support, subscription management, analytics, and more. RapidAPI uses Paypal for payout, so you can get paid out in almost any country.
• Drawbacks: RapidAPI is a very crowded marketplace, which makes it hard to stand out and connect with the community. This problem is exacerbated by poor quality control on the site, which is filled with TOS-violating APIs, junk comments, and crypto spam in forums. The lack of upkeep is especially annoying because they charge 20% of revenue for their marketplace fees, which doesn't even cover the Paypal payout fee.

api.market#

• api.market seems like a beta API marketplace. It claims to be the "Shopify for API sellers" - handling auth, billing, analytics, portals, and more.
• Benefits: Unclear
• Drawbacks: This site is quite rough around the edges with obvious UI bugs and inconsistencies. I would personally steer clear until its more complete. There are only around 50 APIs listed on here so not very useful for users either

Zyla API Hub#

• Zyla is a more recent competitor in the API market space. They have hundreds of APIs listed, covering several different categories including AI, Email, Travel, and more.
• Benefits: Zyla seems more curated and better categorized than Rapid
• Drawbacks: As an API provider, the flexibility in how you charge for your API is very limited. You can't control the price, annual plan discount, or trial length. Despite the platform's lack of support for even basic pricing controls, they still charge 20%. What's even worse is that there doesn't seem to be a way to connect directly with the API provider for support, so the lock-in is even tighter than on other platforms.

API Layer#

• API Layer is a highly-curated marketplace, only offering around 100 APIs. I don't have much to say about this platform from the provider-side because the intake form is very basic and my API is stuck in review
• Benefits: If your API clears the bar, then you will likely be one of the only solutions for your problems space in the market. Most APIs on the market are legit. The API pages are well designed and easy to use.
• Drawbacks: The docs provide almost no information on the platform or any fees for providers. One dark pattern I noticed is that testing an API automatically subscribes you to the free plan

Final Thoughts#

Overall, none of the offerings here are particularly compelling for the price. Here's some alternatives:

• If you want a development + productization + monetization solution, use an advanced API gateway like Zuplo
• If you simply want productization + monetization, consider solutions like Fabrix
• If you simply want to add monetization to your API that already has a developer portal, consider Moesif

Pair any of those solutions above with distribution through API Directories, and you potentially see similar results to using an API Marketplace, without the revenue share fees or other drawbacks.

Next Steps#

Thanks for reading! If you're wondering why I didn't mention platforms like Zapier above, I consider them a separate category (Integration Platform as a Service or IPaaS) and cover them in my next post. You can also read our Ultimate Guide to API Promotion and Marketing for a more holistic understanding of the problem.