API Monetization and FinOps for SaaS: Real Solutions with Kong

Revisit one of our sessions from API Summit 2024!

The economics of APIs are much talked about, but yet not very well understood by API practitioners. For the most part, we find value conversations about APIs restricted to integration and less about product or discernibly hard numbers of revenue or cost from running APIs, whether it's in an external developer context or within the organization.

This talk aims to bring demonstrable architecture and real-life solutions to these problems in the context of Kong. We'll address how to build or buy a solution for API monetization and subscription-based billing, based on usage (primarily for external APIs), and how this can also be applied in a chargeback context (primarily for internal APIs). We'll also extend this to talk through how the same concepts apply for every multi-tenant SaaS company that is providing ""some capability"" as a service and how APIs become a powerful way to gather fine-grained usage stats for FinOps purposes, that can help reason and answer questions around tenant's resource usage, cost of free, freemium tiers (if relevant) and how this can be used for providing better pricing insights and reducing customer churn.