A Catalogue of Analysis Operations for API Pricing Plans

Abstract

In recent years, the usage of public APIs offered by third party providers has fostered the development of the API Economy. Companies use APIs as business assets and they bill consumers for their consumption. The pricing of an API usually includes multiple plans with different limitations and features, from which consumers may choose. In this scenario, consumers who wish to use the API may ask some questions about, for example, which plans to get or what they can do with a maximum budget. Answering these questions manually may be tedious and error-prone, so their automation would be useful. Previous research about analysis operations for limitation-aware microservices architectures led us to the need to get a better understanding of operations for an API pricing. In this paper, we propose an initial catalogue of 11 analysis operations for usual pricing specifications. While it is not an exhaustive set, we intend to show the need to have a catalogue of operations to pave the way for further questions and automated tools.