Before you begin

Overview¶

Products are the heart of Nadles. They aggregate all aspects of your customers' future subscriptions. Think of them as subscription plans.

There are several important questions to answer before configuring your products with Nadles.

What do I include in the product?¶

A product on Nadles can be comprised of:

A single API.

Users subscribe and use API keys issued by Nadles to access it.
Several APIs/API bundle.

In this case the user will be able to use the same API key for all APIs in the subscription.
A subset of endpoints of an API.

The user will be able to access only the endpoints included in the product. This is useful for the case, when you are going to split endpoints into basic and premium.

Example

For a currency exchange rate API, you might want to grant access to historical data on a premium plan only.

In order to achieve that, you don't include the endpoint returning historical data in the basic product, but include it in the premium product.
Any combination of endpoints from any number of APIs.

This allows for maximum flexibility when configuring your products.

What do I charge for?¶

Modern best practices in API productization advise, instead of charging for a synthetic "number of API calls" metric, to charge for the actual value the customer gets from your API (why?).

Here are some examples of product metrics:

Number of images compressed by your API
Number of characters translated by your AI translator
Number of minutes of audio generated by your Text-To-Speech engine
Number of e-mails/SMS sent via your API

Using product-relevant names for metrics lets your customers easily understand the offer and choose the right product to subscribe to.

Any product metric can be configured and used to bill your customers with Nadles.

How do I charge for my products?¶

Do I apply usage-based pricing model? Do I charge a flat fee? How often do I charge? Should there be a free tier?

What limitations can I impose?¶

There is a huge variety of limitations that can be imposed on API products.

By carefully thinking those through, you offer your customers fair terms that satisfy their needs and are equally profitable to your and them.

Limits on product metrics¶

Nadles allows to impose limits on product metrics (see What do I charge for?) and periodically reset quotas after a configured period of time.

Here are some examples of quotas that can be introduced in your products:

Example

API	Quota
Generating audio from text	100 of minutes of generated audio per month
Image compression	100 compressed images, 1GB of processed data per month
AI-powered translation	1 000 000 translated characters per week
E-mail, SMS API	1 000 sent e-mails/SMS per month

Nadles is capable of calculating the metric value for each request/response, automatically.

This value is then recorded, and Nadles Billing Engine processes usage data, billing the customer for the total usage.

Once the limit is exceeded, Nadles API Gateway will reject requests until the next quota reset.

Limits on input parameters¶

Sometimes it might be useful to limit the range of input parameters in basic products, while allowing the full range of values in premium products.

Example

API	Parameter	Basic product	Premium product
Weather API	Historical data availability	max. 10 days	no limit
Mortgage calculator	Available repayment intervals	Month	Week, 2 weeks, month, year
Image recognition	Available input formats	JPEG	JPEG, PNG, TIFF, RAW

Nadles allows you to flexibly configure the limits on input parameters, regardless of how they're passed to your API: in query strings, in JSON body or in HTTP headers.

Nadles API Gateway will reject requests if input parameters are out of the allowed range.

Pricing page¶

Summarize answers to the questions above into a single table and get your ready-made pricing page.

Without usage-based pricing, flat fee:

Weather API — Basic	Weather API — Advanced	Weather API — Premium
100 forecasts per month	10 000 forecasts per month	1 000 000 forecasts
No historical data	10 days of historical data	Full historical data
No government weather alerts	Government weather alerts	Government weather alerts
$5 / month	$25 / month	$250 / month

With usage-based pricing (pay-per-use):

Weather API — Basic	Weather API — Advanced	Weather API — Premium
$0.1 per forecast	$0.1 per forecast	$0.1 per forecast
No historical data	10 days of historical data	Full historical data
No government weather alerts	Government weather alerts	Government weather alerts
$5 / month	$25 / month	$250 / month

In the next chapters you'll learn how to configure products like that with Nadles.