API Monetization: Now in Public Beta

Zuplo’s API Monetization is now in public beta. It’s a fully integrated system that lets you price, bill, and meter your APIs directly from the gateway. No external metering services, no webhook spaghetti, no state sync headaches. Define your pricing, connect Stripe, and start billing. Zuplo handles metering, quota enforcement, and subscription management as a single integrated system.

Most teams attempting API monetization cobble together three separate systems: a metering service to count usage, a billing platform to charge customers, and custom gateway logic to enforce limits. These systems inevitably drift apart. Zuplo eliminates this by making the gateway the single source of truth. Every request that hits your API is metered, enforced, and billed through one system.

Pricing Plans and Rate Cards

Create flat-rate, tiered, and usage-based pricing models with configurable billing cadences (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, and more). Rate cards connect features to prices and entitlements, supporting graduated tiered pricing where the first 1,000 API calls might cost $0.01 each and the next 10,000 cost $0.005.

Plans move through a managed lifecycle: Draft, Published, End of Sale, and Retired. You can version plans to iterate on pricing while maintaining existing subscriptions on older versions, duplicate plans to quickly spin up variations, and create private plans hidden from the public pricing table for enterprise or custom deals.

See the Plans and Pricing documentation for all available pricing models.

Stripe Integration

Connect your Stripe account through the Zuplo Portal and publishing plans automatically creates corresponding Stripe Products and Prices. When a customer subscribes through your Dev Portal, Stripe handles the checkout and payment processing. Zuplo listens to Stripe webhooks for subscription lifecycle events, keeping everything in sync.

Zuplo is the source of truth for access control and metering. Stripe is the source of truth for payment state.

See the Stripe Integration documentation for setup instructions.

Metering and Quota Enforcement

The monetization inbound policy meters every request at the gateway in real time. Usage is tracked per subscription and enforced against plan entitlements. You can configure hard limits that block requests when a quota is exceeded, or soft limits that allow overages and bill for them through Stripe automatically.

Plan-scoped API keys are issued automatically when a customer subscribes, so each key is tied to a specific plan’s entitlements.

Self-Service in the Dev Portal

Once monetization is enabled, your Developer Portal gains several new pages:

• Pricing page: Displays all published plans with feature comparisons, pricing details, and subscribe buttons. Unauthenticated visitors see plans and pricing. Authenticated users see their current plan and get upgrade/downgrade options.
• Subscription management: Lists all subscriptions (current and past), shows the current billing period, and provides cancel, upgrade, or downgrade actions.
• Usage dashboard: Real-time view of quota consumption for the current billing period with visual progress indicators for each metered feature.
• API key management: Keys are displayed in the context of their subscription, making it clear which key corresponds to which plan. Customers can regenerate keys directly.

Get Started

The Monetization Quickstart walks you through the full setup from scratch. By the end you’ll have a pricing page in your Dev Portal, Stripe-powered checkout, plan-scoped API keys, real-time usage metering, and quota enforcement with overage billing.

Josh Twist, Zuplo CEO, also published a walkthrough post with an overview video that covers the full quickstart flow.

Monetization is in beta and free to try. To go to production, contact sales@zuplo.com.

See the full Monetization documentation for everything else.