Apigee recently announced it’s making its enterprise-grade API management platform available free of charge. At the same time, it unveiled a list of upgrades to the platform. Does this mean you can get something for nothing? It depends.
In his blog From the Home Port, Chris Haddad — the vice president of technology evangelism for Apigee competitor WSO2 — contends that limit could be reached by a successful business API.
“3.5M API calls a day translates into about 1.35 calls per second, which seems like a significant threshold, until you start running a majority of your business messages through their service offering,” Hadded writes.
It’s not unusual for companies to offer “freemium” products these days, which generally function by offering you a free service, then charging for support or as usage scales. In other software areas, it’s frequently seen in response to competition from open source alternatives, which tend to use this business model.
So why is Apigee offering the free enterprise edition?
“We did this in response to customer demand,” CTO Greg Brail stated in response to emailed questions. “With the app economy heating up, we've seen a dramatic increase in demand for good APIs, and we wanted to make it easy for any organization to establish and prove an API initiative with absolutely no risk.”
Apigee is not the first API management vendor to launch a freemium API service.
There are also a number of open source solutions, including WSO2’s API Manager tool, which was announced earlier this month and is available for free download under the Apache license. WSO2 uses a different business model, making its revenues from production support, which is $10,000 per server per year, plus development consulting and services. So the API management tool is available for free download and can be used without traffic volume limits.
Obviously, that’s a big difference in the pricing. And therein lies the key takeaway for IT leaders and developers: Beware the details.
API management vendors offer different types of solutions and services with their paid rates, which makes it difficult to compare apples-to-apples when shopping for an API management tool.
- A gateway service for safely exposing, managing and scaling APIs.
- App services, which are built on open source technology acquired from Usergrid, which includes support for features such as social graphs, user management, data storage and geo location, among others.
- Developers Channel Services, so organizations can offer a developer portal.
- Integrated analytic services for examining API data.
The company acquired the mobile cloud platform Usergrid, the technology assets of Wholsesale Applications Community, and more recently, InstaOps, a small Austin company that develops analytics software for tracking mobile app performance. All of which adds up to a significant investment in mobile applications management that extends beyond managing APIs.
In July, Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor told TechCrunch the company’s strategy will be “mobile first,” adding, “We’re going to do a lot more to help developers build mobile apps.”
If you'd like to learn more about Apigee, it offers an OAuth API to support authentication across multiple APIs.