API Economy

The API Economy is Apiway’s cross-organisation marketplace. Producers publish APIs for external consumption; consumers discover, subscribe, and integrate — with governance, metering, and isolation 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. Products (bundles of APIs) have the same exposure controls.

Trust Signals

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

• 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 quality before subscribing.

Cross-Tenant Subscribe Pipeline

Subscribes across tenants are orchestrated by a programme pipeline with two cooperating runners and a Redis-stream transport — never in-process tenant impersonation.

1. Consumer initiates — a tenant clicks Subscribe on a marketplace API or Product. The request carries the marketplace catalogueId (string).

2. Consumer-side onboard — ConsumerOnboardService creates a local Api mirror (prospect → promoted API with CatalogueId back-link to the marketplace row), imports the spec, and records an in-progress dependency. For Product subscribes, a consumer-side ApiProduct mirror is also created with a bundle subscription row set to Status = Requested.

3. Originator publishes — CrossTenantSubscribeOriginatorRunner publishes a request message to the cross-tenant request Redis stream, keyed on the producer tenant. The programme records “awaiting producer approval”.

4. Producer receives — CrossTenantSubscribeReceiverRunner on the producer pod consumes the stream, resolves catalogue → producer tenant + API, ensures a local Consumer record, and creates the producer-side ApiSubscription + ApprovalFlow. Scopes requested by the consumer are intersected with the producer API’s OAS-declared scopes — unknowns are dropped.

5. Producer approves — governance runs (auto or manual). On approval, GovernanceApiService publishes a response message on the cross-tenant response stream with the credential, granted scopes, granted SLA variant, and producer gateway URL.

6. Consumer reconciles — the Originator’s callback reconciliation phase creates/updates the consumer’s upstream subscription row, snapshots the producer’s OSS into a consumer-side OpenSlaSpecification with Distribute = true (so it resolves as the currently-applied SLA), triggers a consumer-side deploy, and marks the dependency Completed.

Note

Member fanout for a Product subscribe runs the same single-API pipeline per member. The bundle row tracks the Product-level state; each member has its own per-API subscription rows.

Public URL Invariants

Consumer-facing rows must never carry a producer-internal URL (e.g. *.svc.cluster.local inside the producer’s cluster). The production invariants:

• InstanceDto.PublicBaseUrl is derived server-side from the gateway instance’s hostname + ProjectCodeName. For in-cluster gateways this maps to https://{first-label}.gateway.apiway.net/{ProjectCodeName}; otherwise the host/port pass through verbatim.
• DeploymentJob.GatewayBaseUrl is stamped from PublicBaseUrl (single source of truth).
• When the worker’s response carries an internal URL, DeploymentResponseStoreCommand.ComposePublicGatewayPathUrl retargets onto the public base before persisting.
• Integration tests enforce the rule via ConsumerFacingUrlInvariants.AssertPublic.

Custom domains take precedence — when set on the deployment’s CustomDomains, the marketplace publisher uses https://{customDomain} instead of the derived public base.

API-Level P&L

Apiway tracks economics at the API and Product 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 with a SupplierId back-link:

• 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
• Supplier chip — The consumer subscription view surfaces supplier metadata (display name, support email, status page, verified badge)

Onboarding External APIs

For APIs that exist outside the Apiway marketplace (third-party APIs), the consumer onboarding pipeline brings 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 the marketplace / governance / cross-tenant handshake.