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 as a programme, with the producer and consumer sides each acting under their own authority. One tenant never acts in another’s name.

1. The consumer subscribes — from the marketplace, to an API or a Product.

2. Their side is prepared — the API appears in their own estate as a dependency they are waiting on, with its contract, so they can start building against it.

3. The producer is asked — the request goes to the producer, and nothing is granted until the producer decides. Scopes the consumer asked for that the producer’s contract does not declare are dropped.

4. The producer decides — through their own governance, automatic or manual.

5. On approval, the consumer is ready — they receive their credential, the scopes granted, the plan and its service levels as agreed, and the address to call. Their side is updated to match.

A Product subscription goes through the same steps once, and covers every API in the Product.

The Address Your Consumers See

The address your consumers see is always a public one — never an address inside your own cluster. If you have set a custom domain, that is the address they see.

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.