Investing in Archetype

billing infrastructure for APIs

For developers today, it’s not super difficult to build an API. The difficulty comes once you’re ready to deploy and host/distribute it. In order to get their APIs in the ‘hands’ of other developers, it’s important that their distribution strategy can generate sufficient awareness and discoverability for their APIs. The most common distribution channel has been via API marketplaces like Rapid API. According to Rapid API, ‘An API marketplace works in the same way as these other online marketplaces, allowing providers to list APIs and developers to consume them. Like other types of marketplaces, a typical API marketplace has several components including a developer portal and an API provider portal.’

To break it down further, developers will publish APIs; the APIs are then catalogued and shown via an API developer portal. Consumers of APIs (i.e. other developers), will discover and explore the displayed APIs to which are grouped by specific categories or types. The benefits of a marketplaces are; it allows developers and consumers to find your APIs, it encourages participation, promotes evangelism, and most often is a great place to get feedback on products. However, the twitter thread below points out some of the disadvantages or pain points one might face when hosting an API on a marketplace.

Archetype @GetArchetype

2/ Marketing's a mess On a marketplace, you have to direct all incoming traffic to the marketplace which drives users away from your own site. This means your users can't easily engage with your existing products or future offerings and splits your marketing team's focus.

Archetype @GetArchetype

3/ Analytics Suck Integrating third party services is required to see endpoint health. You can't get a breakdown on what your users are doing by cohorts or how you can better optimize your pricing and services for maximum value.

Archetype @GetArchetype

4/ Fees are insane On RapidAPI, you're paying them and @PayPal >30% for every dollar you make to host your API.

Archetype @GetArchetype

5/ The experience is pretty bad APIs have to wrestle with quotas never working and non-existent support. Additionally, your customers can't engage effectively with you or your brand and it's impossible to get clear picture into when or why things break.

And finally….

Archetype @GetArchetype

6/ You lose credibility APIs hosted on marketplaces usually are seen as less sophisticated and lower quality because of the amount of bad APIs that exist on these marketplaces.

As more and more tech companies becomes API-first (API usage grew 47% last year), it’s imperative that innovation is not held back by poor revenue infrastructure. API-first companies make most of their revenue via the usage of their API. RevOps teams are looking at two major components when it comes to revenue; Tracking usage & Predicting usage. Being able to track API usage is very important because it is an indication of how much to charge a customer. When it comes to offering volume based discounts, predicting usage plays a huge role. Sure companies can monetize with the help of Stripe. However, integration can take months with ‘the average time to market for APIs being 4 months’. There are over 100,000 API-first companies in market today. 31% of enterprises are looking to publish and monetize their APIs within the next 12 months. There is a huge opportunity to solve these issues. This is where Archetype comes in.

Archetype is building the first billing infrastructure built for APIs. They are allowing any API to be published in minutes on any public domain of choice. Developers can integrate Archetype in minutes with their backend and frontend SDKs to create new tiers, update prices and permissions in their website without any further engineering input. Archetype can handle quota management, endpoint access, billing invoices, and analytics. Companies can easily create usage based pricing models or subscription based plans and toggle between them in seconds. With Archetype, developers can focus solely on building and managing their APIs. After struggling for over a month to monetize the API for their previous company Lantern, the founders of Archetype, Behailu Tekletsadik and Shaon Chowdhury decided to go out and build the solution themselves.

Not only are customers excited about Archetype but so am I. That’s why I’m excited announce that I’ve backed the amazing team behind Archetype. Archetype raised $3m seed round led by MaC Ventures with participation from Soma Capital, Hustlefund, Magic Fund, Nomo Ventures, Fast.xyz and incredible angels.