Wealth Engine
The Wealth Engine turns API consumption data into financial intelligence. It tracks revenue from produced APIs, costs from consumed APIs, and calculates margin at the individual API level.
API-Level P&L
Section titled “API-Level P&L”Every API in your portfolio has a financial position:
| Metric | Source |
|---|---|
| Revenue | RU consumed by subscribers of your APIs |
| Cost | RU you consume from external APIs |
| Margin | Revenue minus cost |
| Trend | Is this API’s margin growing or shrinking? |
Negative-margin APIs are surfaced immediately — ensuring every produced API creates value, not just traffic.
How It Works
Section titled “How It Works”- Gateway meters every request — RU cost per operation, tracked per subscription
- RU Service aggregates — Consumption data flushed from gateway to RU Service in background batches
- Cost centre calculates — Revenue from inbound subscriptions, cost from outbound consumption
- Wealth Engine reports — Portfolio-level P&L across all APIs
Producer Revenue
Section titled “Producer Revenue”When consumers call your APIs, each request has an RU cost defined by your OpenSLA tier:
- Per-operation cost — A complex query might cost 5 RU; a simple lookup costs 1 RU
- Per-tier pricing — Premium tiers can have different RU rates than Free tiers
- Per-subscription tracking — See which consumers generate the most revenue
Consumer Cost Control
Section titled “Consumer Cost Control”When you consume external APIs, the Wealth Engine tracks what you spend:
- Budget ceiling — Set a maximum spend per billing period
- Soft alert — Notification when approaching the threshold (e.g., 80%)
- Hard stop — Gateway blocks requests when the ceiling is reached (402 Payment Required)
- Daily vs quarterly — A deployment bug on Friday evening should cost the daily budget, not the quarterly forecast
See Cost Control for implementation details.
Dependency Economics
Section titled “Dependency Economics”When a produced API depends on a consumed API (the aggregator pattern):
- The consumed API’s cost is attributed to the produced API
- Margin = produced API revenue - dependency costs
- If the dependency cost exceeds the revenue, the produced API runs at a loss
- The Wealth Engine flags this for review
Portfolio Balance Sheet
Section titled “Portfolio Balance Sheet”At the organisation level, the Wealth Engine provides:
- Total API revenue — Sum of all produced API revenue
- Total API cost — Sum of all consumed API costs
- Net position — Overall API economy balance
- Top revenue APIs — Which APIs generate the most value
- Cost hotspots — Which consumed APIs cost the most
- Margin distribution — How margins are distributed across the portfolio
SLA Tier Economics
Section titled “SLA Tier Economics”Revenue is broken down by OpenSLA tier:
| Tier | Subscribers | Revenue | % of Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 47 | 0 | 0% |
| Standard | 12 | 24,000 RU | 60% |
| Premium | 3 | 16,000 RU | 40% |
This tells you which tiers drive revenue and whether your pricing model is working.
Right-Sizing Recommendations
Section titled “Right-Sizing Recommendations”The Wealth Engine surfaces optimisation opportunities:
- Upgrade candidates — Consumers consistently hitting their tier limits
- Overprovisioned subscriptions — Consumers on Premium who only use Standard-level throughput
- Negative margin APIs — APIs that cost more to operate than they earn
- Unused APIs — APIs with zero consumption over a billing period