Twilio started as a telephony infrastructure company. Its API product — a simple, developer-friendly interface to complex telecoms infrastructure — became worth $50 billion because it made a hard thing easy and charged per use. Stripe did the same for payments. Segment did it for customer data. The pattern: take a capability that is hard to build and expensive to maintain, expose it through a clean API, and charge developers and businesses to use it.
Indian enterprises sitting on unique data or operational capabilities should be asking: what do we have that others need? A logistics company with ten years of delivery time data for every postal code in India has an asset. An insurance company with actuarial models for specific risk categories has an asset. A bank with real-time transaction data has an asset. Any of these could be an API product.
Building an API product requires thinking differently from building an internal tool. The developer experience — the experience of a developer discovering, understanding, and integrating your API — is the product. Documentation is marketing. Code examples are the product demo. The API reference is the product manual. A developer who cannot get their first successful API call within thirty minutes of reading your documentation will not build with your API regardless of its capability.
Monetisation models for API products fall into four categories. Per-call pricing is the simplest: you pay for each API request. It aligns revenue with usage but creates unpredictability for customers. Tiered pricing offers a set number of API calls per tier, with overage charges. It reduces unpredictability while still tying cost to value. Subscription pricing charges a flat monthly fee for access up to a limit. Revenue sharing is a model where the API provider takes a percentage of the economic value generated by the API consumer — used by payment APIs like Razorpay and Stripe.
The Indian API economy is earlier than the US equivalent but growing rapidly. The Account Aggregator framework, UPI, and ONDC are creating API-first public digital infrastructure that is creating opportunities for API product businesses across financial services, commerce, and logistics.