An API Free-for-All Ensues

Given the fact that the digital economy essentially revolves around application programming interfaces, it stands to reason that the more APIs there are, the healthier the economy will be.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting a move Apigee made today to make its core service for creating and managing APIs available for free for organizations that make fewer than 3.5 million API calls per month. The company plans to make money by providing support services and extensions that make it easier to integrate applications and secure those APIs.

According to Apigee CTO Greg Brail, more than half of Internet traffic is now moving through APIs rather than Web browsers. Even still, while API usage in some vertical industries such as publishing and retail is heavy, there are other industry segments where the whole concept of using an API to integrate and access data across is relatively nascent. By making the core Apigee service available for free, Brail says that Apigee is hoping a larger base of developers will start to make more routine use of APIs.

Because most APIs are relatively brittle and generally need to be updated frequently, most organizations don’t really have a management platform in place that is optimized to manage them. Apigee essentially provides a management platform through which developers can more easily expose and manage APIs using proxies that make it easier for another developer to invoke an API using a standard set of calls.

While the whole concept of APIs as an integration tool is hardly new, API usage on the whole has been rapidly maturing in recent months. And now that a free underlying management service is available, chances are the number of APIs being developed could easily skyrocket in the months ahead.