API Economy

The API Economy is Apiway’s cross-organisation marketplace. Producers publish APIs for external consumption; consumers discover, subscribe, and integrate — with governance and metering at every step.

Publishing to the Marketplace

Producers control visibility with exposure flags:

Exposure	Visibility
Internal	Only your organisation
Partner	Specific partner organisations
Public	Anyone on the platform

Set the exposure level when creating or updating an API. Public and partner APIs appear in the marketplace catalogue.

Trust Signals

The marketplace isn’t a free-for-all. Apiway’s quality toolchain provides trust signals for every listed API:

Compliance score — How well the API meets design standards
Recommendation count — Outstanding improvement suggestions
SLA definition — Clear service level commitments
Governance history — Has this API been reviewed and approved?

Consumers can assess API quality before subscribing.

Subscribing to External APIs

Discovery — Browse the marketplace or search for APIs by name, capability, or business function.
OAS copy — The specification is copied into the consumer’s tenant. No cross-tenant data sharing.
Consumer governance — The copied API goes through the consumer’s own governance flow. Their reviewers assess whether the external API meets their standards.
Deployment — On approval, the API is deployed through the consumer’s gateway. Metering, compliance, and budget controls apply.
Usage — The consumer calls the external API through their own gateway. All traffic is metered and tracked in their cost centre.

API-Level P&L

The API Economy enables financial tracking at the API level:

Metric	Meaning
Revenue RU	Resource units consumed by subscribers of your APIs
Cost RU	Resource units you consume from external APIs
Margin	Revenue minus cost per API

The Wealth Engine aggregates this into a portfolio-level balance sheet:

Which APIs generate the most revenue?
Which APIs cost the most to consume?
Are any produced APIs running at negative margin?
What’s the total API economy balance for the organisation?

Dependency Mapping

When a produced API depends on a consumed external API (the aggregator pattern), Apiway tracks the dependency:

Cost attribution — The consumed API’s cost is attributed to the produced API
Margin calculation — Revenue from the produced API minus the cost of its dependencies
Risk awareness — If a dependency’s SLA is worse than the produced API’s SLA, it’s flagged

Onboarding External APIs

For APIs that exist outside the marketplace (third-party APIs not on Apiway), the consumer onboarding pipeline lets you bring them under management:

curl -X POST https://core.api.apiway.net/v1/programmes/consume \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Stripe Payments",
    "specification": "<base64-encoded OAS>",
    "targetUrl": "https://api.stripe.com"
  }'

This deploys the external API through your gateway for metering and compliance — without mock, recommendations, or verification steps.