Pricing
Providing a machine-readable scaffolding to define the plans and pricing for APIs, and the common elements of each tier of pricing and access available. Pricing is not just about the financial aspect of access to APIs, it is also about which APIs you will have access to, and how much of a resource you can consume over time. Pricing is about enabling API consumers to have a plan for how they will use digital resources that is in alignment with a platform business strategy.
Also known as: Plans, Tiers, Rate Card, Price List
Example
Standards
- schema.org schema.org Offer
- schema.org schema.org PriceSpecification
- schema.org schema.org UnitPriceSpecification
- FinOps Foundation FinOps FOCUS Specification
- Vendor Stripe Pricing Table
- Community Naftiko plans/*.yml
- ISO ISO 4217 — Currency codes
- ISO ISO 8601 — Date and time / durations
HTTP Headers
| Header | Direction | Spec | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
Content-Type |
response | RFC 9110 | Pricing documents are typically served as text/html or application/json; machine-readable feeds may use application/json or application/yaml. |
Status Codes
402 Payment Required— RFC 9110 §15.5.3 — Reserved for future use; some APIs (e.g. Stripe, GitHub) use it to signal billing failure or quota exhaustion.429 Too Many Requests— RFC 6585 §4 — Used when a consumer exceeds the request volume permitted by their pricing tier.
Media Types
text/html— Most public pricing pages are human-readable HTML.application/json— Machine-readable plan / price feeds.application/yaml— Naftiko plans/*.yml and API Commons descriptors.
OpenAPI Expression
-
info.x-pricing(OpenAPI extension (vendor)) — No standard OpenAPI field for pricing; commonly expressed via x- extensions or links in info.description. -
info.termsOfService(OpenAPI 3.x) — Often points to a page that bundles terms with pricing tier definitions.
Governance Rules
info-contact(Spectral built-in) — API metadata must include a contact — pricing inquiries depend on a reachable owner.info-license(Spectral built-in) — License is required and is frequently surfaced alongside pricing.
Risk & Compliance
Compliance:
- PCI DSS v4 — applies whenever pricing pages collect or display cardholder data
- EU Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU) — price transparency for EU consumers
- GDPR — pricing experiments that profile users may require lawful basis
- SOX — material pricing changes for public companies require disclosure controls
Security: Pricing endpoints are scraped aggressively. Inconsistent pricing surfaces (web vs. API vs. sales) cause customer disputes; cache invalidation on tier changes is a frequent source of overcharges.
Tools
- Stripe Billing — Subscription billing
- Recurly — Subscription billing
- Chargebee — Subscription billing
- Metronome — Usage-based billing
- Orb — Usage-based billing
- OpenMeter — Open-source metering (Apache-2.0)
Suggested Metrics
arpu— Average revenue per user across a plan or cohort.plan_conversion_rate— Share of free / trial accounts that upgrade to a paid tier.price_per_call— Effective unit price derived from total spend over total billable calls.overage_rate— Share of customers exceeding their plan limits in a period.tier_distribution— Headcount or revenue split across plan tiers.
Example Implementations
- Stripe — Tiered, volume, and graduated pricing models exposed via Prices and Products APIs.
- AWS — Per-service price lists published as Price List Bulk API (JSON / CSV).
- Anthropic — Per-million-token input / output pricing tiers with cached-token discounts.
- OpenAI — Per-model token pricing with batch and cached-input discounts.
Related Properties
Tags
- SDKs