April 04, 2024 API Development

The AI API Gold Rush: How to Turn Your Models into Revenue With Moesif

So, you’ve built a cutting-edge AI model! Congratulations! With the vast array of AI capabilities coming to market, it may generate realistic product descriptions, analyze customer sentiment, or perform cutting-edge processing. Innovation with AI is helping companies to discover new capabilities and use cases. However, innovation alone isn’t enough. To truly reap the rewards of an investment in AI, companies need a strategy to monetize it. That’s where AI APIs come in, providing a streamlined way to integrate your AI capabilities into other applications and create new revenue streams.

API monetization might seem complex, but it doesn’t have to be. Regarding AI APIs, monetization involves understanding the value the AI functionality delivers, deciding on a suitable pricing model, and implementing the technical infrastructure to manage usage and billing. Luckily, specialized platforms like Moesif are dedicated to this purpose, making the task far more manageable.

In this blog post, we’ll explore AI API monetization. We’ll discuss the fundamental reasons for turning your AI endpoints into revenue sources, how to select the best monetization strategies, and how to use Moesif to manage the process step-by-step. By the end of this blog, you’ll know how to turn your AI innovation into a sustainable revenue stream quickly! Let’s begin by defining an AI API.

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Understanding the AI API

An AI API (Application Programming Interface) is a communication gateway between your AI models or services and external applications. It provides a standardized way for different software components to interact with your AI capabilities. This abstraction allows developers to seamlessly integrate your AI service into their projects without needing a deep understanding of your model’s underlying architecture and implementation.

For example, imagine you’ve built a proprietary AI model that excels at analyzing market sentiment based on financial news and social media feeds. By offering this capability through an API, you empower trading platforms or investment tools with valuable real-time insights, giving them a competitive edge. Quite a few AI APIs have been built and used extensively by developers. These include Google’s Cloud Vision API and OpenAI’s popular GPT-3 API.

Google Cloud Vision API

This API exposes Google’s powerful recognition models, enabling classification, object detection, facial analysis, and content moderation tasks. These readily available functionalities save developers significant time and resources compared to building similar models from scratch.

OpenAI’s GPT-3 API

This API provides access to a world-class language generation model. Applications built on top of it can create realistic dialogue for chatbots, generate marketing copy, translate languages, or even power creative writing tools.

REST APIs are commonly chosen as a protocol for AI APIs due to their familiarity and scalability. However, technologies like GraphQL are gaining popularity by offering more flexibility in querying data.

Overall, AI APIs have become foundational in making AI technologies accessible. They lower the technical barrier for developers, allowing them to focus on building innovative applications powered by cutting-edge AI models.

Why Monetize Your AI API?

Monetization is a natural step if you’ve invested significant time, expertise, and computing resources into developing a unique and valuable AI model. By beginning to drive revenue from your AI capabilities, your organization can derive the maximum value from the services you’ve built. Here are some common reasons organizations turn their AI APIs into revenue streams.

Offset Development and Operational Costs

There are substantial expenses for AI research, model training, and the necessary infrastructure. Monetizing your API helps recoup these investments and ensures the long-term sustainability of continuing to develop AI services.

Recurring Revenue Model

API monetization enables you to generate a consistent income stream, especially with usage-based pricing models. This predictability is incredibly attractive compared to the often project-based nature of other software development work.

Market Validation

When users are willing to pay for access to your AI API, it’s a strong signal that your model provides genuine, quantifiable value. This validation can attract further investment and partnerships.

Growing the Ecosystem

By making your AI capabilities commercially accessible, you foster a developer ecosystem around your models. This accessibility can lead to innovative use cases you may not have envisioned, increasing the overall impact of your AI work.

Beyond creating a new revenue stream, monetization often forces organizations to think deeply about packaging their APIs in a user-friendly and reliable manner. This process benefits your users and inadvertently improves the overall quality of your offering. It’s also important to remember that not all AI models are inherently suitable for monetization. Successful monetization hinges on having a model or service that provides a clear and unique value proposition in the marketplace. Most importantly, the service must be something developers are willing to pay for. Next, let’s look at various strategies for monetizing AI APIs.

Monetization Strategies for AI APIs

Once you’ve decided to monetize your API, choosing a suitable pricing model is critical to turning raw API access into a profitable venture. Let’s look at a few common strategies and factors regarding API monetization:

1. Usage-Based Pricing

How it Works: Users are charged based on the number of API calls they make or the amount of data processed. This can be metered per API call, compute time, output data size, or custom metrics specific to your AI model’s function.
When it’s Ideal: Suits AI models with predictable usage patterns and when costs align well with API call volume.
Example: A processing API might charge per analyzed or resized.

2. Subscription-Based Pricing

How it Works: Users pay a recurring fee (monthly or annually) for access to a specific amount of API usage within a defined time frame. Different tiers are often offered with varying usage limits and additional features.
When it’s Ideal: Works well for AI models that provide consistent value and are likely to be used frequently.
Example: A language generation API might offer tiers based on the monthly number of words/characters generated.

3. Freemium

How it Works: Offers a basic level of API access free of charge, with usage limits or reduced functionality. Users pay to upgrade to premium tiers that unlock higher limits, more features, or better support.
When it’s Ideal: Excellent for attracting a broad developer base and allowing users to test your API before committing financially, this model is often paired with usage-based or subscription-like pricing for premium tiers.
Example: A sentiment analysis API might offer limited free requests and charge for larger volumes or more complex analyses.

You might also want to consider some other considerations when deciding on which pricing model to adopt. In some instances, you may want to offer a more hybrid approach, offering multiple models.**Combining different strategies (like freemium with usage-based) can be highly effective.

In order to garner traction, you’ll also want to make sure to define your value proposition very clearly. By clearly defining the problem your AI API solves better than any other solution on the market, developers will be more willing to give your API and AI capabilities an initial go.

Lastly, understanding potential customers’ budgets and payment preferences is essential for designing appropriate pricing structures. Choosing the optimal monetization strategy is an iterative process. Start with a clear hypothesis, monitor usage patterns, and be flexible enough to adapt your pricing model as you learn what works best for your specific API and user base.

Challenges of API Monetization

Monetizing an AI API, while offering significant benefits, isn’t without its complexities. Monetization is challenging; however, with proper planning and knowledge of the shortcomings of the technologies you use to monetize your APIs, you can still implement it successfully. Here are critical challenges to recognize and strategize for:

Pricing Sweet Spot

Finding the right price point is crucial when it comes to getting people to consider and buy API access. Charge too much, and you risk deterring potential users. Price it too low, and you leave revenue on the table. Depending on the pricing model being used, experimenting with pricing can become complex. This is especially true with usage-based billing, which introduces an added layer of complexity to pricing decisions. Overall, market research and knowing your target audience’s budget will help to narrow down the solution to the pricing problem.

Security and Rate Limiting

Once you begin monetizing your APIs, you must implement robust mechanisms to prevent API abuse and unauthorized access. This includes authentication, rate limiting to mitigate denial-of-service attacks, and careful consideration of data privacy issues. By allowing users to overuse their quota, if they are prepaid, or allowing massive amounts of traffic through for postpaid customers, you could leave money on the table or even begin costing yourself money. A good example would be if your API depends on a third-party API you pay for. If users are allowed to use the API freely, this could accumulate a bill on your side, a potential risk if customers do not settle their tab or can blow past their prepaid quota.

Superb Documentation

With a focus on selling your APIs, documentation becomes a key feature in usability for developers accessing the APIs. Excellent documentation is more than just a courtesy; it’s a sales tool. For seamless integration, developers need explicit instructions, examples, comprehensive error-handling explanations, and SDK guides. By covering your API documentation from every angle, you can ensure that developers can easily use your APIs when they decide to use them. Documentation is king when it comes to selling APIs and keeping developers happy.

Market Competition

As APIs become more abundant, your offering may compete with other monetized APIs offering the same functionality or even competing with free solutions. Because of this, standing out in the increasingly crowded world of AI APIs can be difficult. When it comes to AI APIs, it helps to clearly articulate your model’s unique strengths and tailor your marketing to your target audience’s specific pain points. Keep an eye on competitors and evolve your product offering and pricing with market trends as often as possible.

Although the challenges mentioned above are significant and should be considered, dedicated API analytics and monetization platforms can significantly streamline the process of API monetization. They can handle billing and user management and provide deep insights into usage trends, easing the technical and administrative burdens of implementing monetization. To show you how easy it is, let’s look at how you can monetize your AI API with Moesif next.

How to Monetize Your AI API with Moesif

Now, let’s look at how Moesif can be used to monetize your APIs. Below, we will go through a step-by-step example of how to:

Integrate a billing provider, notably Stripe, with Moesif for billing and account management
Create a billing meter in Moesif to keep track of API calls and report them to a billing provider
Implement a pre-paid model using Moesif’s governance rules to ensure user access is halted once they run out of credits

First, let’s look at what our AI API will look like and how we want to calculate usage.

The AI API

In this example, we will use a request/response payload similar to OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. For our purposes, we only really care about the response since that contains the data we want to monetize based on.

In this example, we will have an endpoint called /ai/chat/ that allows users to input prompts and receive a response. We will monetize the API’s response since it will contain information about the number of tokens used in the prompt and the AI response.

Here is what the API response for our example AI API looks like:

{
  "id": "chatcmpl-123",
  "object": "chat.completion",
  "created": 1677652288,
  "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo-0125",
  "system_fingerprint": "fp_44709d6fcb",
  "choices": [{
    "index": 0,
    "message": {
      "role": "assistant",
      "content": "\n\nHello there, how may I assist you today?",
    },
    "logprobs": null,
    "finish_reason": "stop"
  }],
  "usage": {
    "prompt_tokens": 9,
    "completion_tokens": 12,
    "total_tokens": 21
  }
}

Our focus will be mainly on the usage payload, which shows the prompt_tokens, completion_tokens, and total_tokens. In this example, we will use the total_tokens amount to burn down a pre-paid balance. However, if your API does not have such a total, you could create a custom metric that will allow you to combine prompt_tokens and completion_tokens.

Setting Up Moesif for Monetization

With our API understood, it’s time to configure Moesif to integrate with Stripe (our billing provider in this example) and the example AI API. To do this next step, you’ll need to make sure that you have the following prerequisites checked off:

An active Moesif account
An active Stripe account

Once you have handled these prerequisites, you can move forward with API monetization with Moesif! Let’s begin by integrating your API with Moesif.

If you’d like to see end-to-end monetization guides for specific SDKs and Gateways, check out our examples for Node, Django, Go, Kong, Tyk, and AWS API Gateway.

Integrate With The AI API

Moesif can integrate with your APIs in various ways. The two main options are via one of our easy-to-use SDKs or a plugin for popular API gateway and API management platforms. To see the complete list, check out our integrations page.

You’ll also want to ensure that users are accurately tracked to attribute usage correctly. To do this, you will use Moesif’s user and company tracking. Many plugins that connect Moesif to your gateway will support this by default (as long as calls are authenticated); however, the SDKs may require some custom work but are conversely more flexible. You can check out our docs for more information on user and company tracking.

Once the API is integrated, in Moesif’s Live Event Log, you will see something similar to this:

Once you also have user and company tracking enabled, you will see that the user is now tagged as a specific user and company in Moesif so that their API calls can be aggregated and billed accordingly.

Connect to the Stripe Webhook

Next, with traffic streaming into the platform, we can link Moesif to Stripe. This step is simple and requires only a few things.

The first step in integration is adding the Moesif webhook to the Stripe configuration. This allows Stripe to send subscription updates to Moesif.

For our video walkthrough of how to do this, check out the video here

To add the Moesif webhook to Stripe, click on Developers in the upper right-hand side of the Stripe dashboard and then Webhooks in the left-side menu. This will bring you to the Webhooks page, where you can view existing webhooks and add new ones. We will click the Add an endpoint button at the bottom of the screen to add a new webhook.

From here, plug in the Moesif API endpoint URL and configure the events to listen to. Copy your Moesif Webhook URL, shown in the Stripe Settings modal displayed in Moesif, into the Endpoint URL field. After this, click the + Select Events button.

On the Select events to send screen, Scroll to the Customer section and select the option for Select all Customer events. After this, click the Add events button at the bottom of the screen. You’ll be returned to the original screen where you added the endpoint details. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click Add endpoint to save the webhook endpoint to Stripe.

Plug the Stripe API details into Moesif

For Moesif to add usage quantities to subscriptions in Stripe, we need to add the Stripe API details. This is done in the Stripe configuration screen in Moesif. Currently, Moesif only supports version 2020-08-27 of the Stripe API, so the Stripe API Version field defaults to that.

For the Stripe API Key field, you’ll need to retrieve the API key from Stripe to plug it in. In Stripe, from the Developers screen, click on API Keys in the left-side menu. You’ll then see the private key for your API in either the Secret key or a generated Restricted keys field on the screen. Depending on your security requirements and environment, either key can be copied and used.

After copying the key from Stripe, paste it into the Stripe API Key field on the Stripe Configuration screen in Moesif. After setting the API key value, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click Save to save the configuration in Moesif. Your Stripe integration is complete in Moesif, and you can begin to use it to build plans, prices, and billing meters.

Create a Plan and Price

After logging into Moesif, navigate to the Product Catalog by clicking the corresponding menu item in the left-side navigation. On the Plans page, click the Create New button in the top-right.

On the Create Plan screen, you’ll fill out the plan name and select the billing provider. In this case, we will choose Stripe. Once done, click on the Create button at the top right.

Next, we will create the Price in Moesif by clicking on the Price menu item under the Product Catalog on the left-side menu. On the Price screen, click the Create New button at the top right.

On the next screen, you’ll add the price name and select the Linked Plan from the dropdown. In this case, we will choose “My AI API Plan”, the plan we made in the previous step above.

Under Pricing, we will select the Pricing Model as “Package” and leave the Meter Usage as with the defaults (unless you want to change it for your specific use case). For Price Structure, we will set the value as “0.0001 per 1 unit”. In this case, a unit will be equivalent to one token. Once everything is input, click Create.

Create a Billing Meter

Now, with our API integrated and our pricing set up, let’s set up the meter that will tally up usage and report it to Stripe. In this case, we will look at the API responses’ total_tokens field and use that to meter the API usage.

Alternatively, if you wanted to charge a different amount for input and output tokens, you could set up two prices, one for each token type, under the plan we created, and set up two individual meters that would report the consumption of each token type to each price accordingly. To keep things simple, let’s look at how to create everything based on the total_tokens field.

First, click the + New button in the top left of the screen and then select Billing Meter under API Monetization. On the Create Billing Meter screen, we will add a name,**link the billing meter to the price we created, and set up a filter to include all successful calls to our AI API endpoint. The configuration will look like this:

Then, we will choose the metric on which we will bill. To do this, click the Metrics dropdown underneath the Filter and select Custom Metric. In the dropdown that appears on the right, we will choose Response > body > usage > total_tokens. After that is selected, in the following dropdown to the right, choose sum.

Once you have the metric dialed in, you’ll see a preview of the company’s usage that matches the criteria of your billing meter.

Lastly, click Create in the top right corner. At this point, your billing meter is active and will begin metering usage and sending the usage data over to Stripe. Next, and lastly, we need to put a mechanism in place to stop users from being able to use the API if they have run out of credits.

Create a Prepaid Governance Rule

Now, our last thing to do is ensure that users are blocked when they run out of pre-paid credits. To implement this, we will use Moesif’s Governance Rule feature. To do so, we will again click the + New button and select Gov Rule/Quota under the API Monetization section.

In the wizard modal that appears, select Block when No Available Credits to begin setting up the rule that will block users from accessing the API when they run out of the credits they have purchased.

On the following popup that appears, you will see that a new cohort will automatically be created. By clicking Continue, a new cohort will be created that will be able to manage and keep track of users without credits. After the creation of the cohort, the rule will automatically be created and activated. After this, you’ll be moved into the Update Rule screen, where you can dial in the configuration further if needed. By default, you will see the following:

Here, you can see that Moesif will apply this rule to any users with a 0 balance, blocking further access to the API(s) and returning an overridden response status and response body, all of which can be amended as needed.

If you only want to apply the block to a single endpoint, you can adjust the cohort’s criteria/filter to include the desired endpoints in your blocking functionality.

With this completed, we have an end-to-end prepaid flow for our AI API. We can accurately meter the amount of tokens used in each API call and burn down credits as they are used. Once the user runs out of credits, Moesif will block the user from accessing the upstream AI API using the Governance Rule that we created. Now, it’s time for you to get users in the door and start generating revenue with your API! To make that even more manageable, check out Moesif’s Developer Portal, which helps streamline onboarding users to your monetized APIs (including checkout and API key management capabilities!).

Conclusion

Considering the technical and business complexities, monetizing an AI API can seem overwhelming. As you can see from the above example, Moesif streamlines this process, empowering you to focus on delivering innovative AI capabilities rather than wrestling with the intricacies of billing infrastructure.

Key benefits of using Moesif:

Faster Implementation: Pre-built integrations and intuitive tools accelerate the path from API creation to revenue generation.
Data-Driven Decisions: Moesif’s analytics provide actionable insights into how your API is used, helping optimize pricing and user experience.
Flexible Monetization: Easily experiment with different pricing models and adapt your strategy based on real-world results.
Developer Experience: Moesif’s focus on API monetization and onboarding means a better experience for your users, which helps drive adoption.

Ready to turn your AI innovation into revenue? Sign up for a free trial of Moesif or chat with our team of API monetization experts and start exploring the possibilities!

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API Analytics , API Monitoring , Best Practices

Matt Tanner

Head of Developer Relations at Moesif. Previously @Tyk and @Dgraph Labs

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