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## About companies and developers

With monetization, companies and developers are the entities who either pay you, or whom you
pay, to use your APIs. A **developer** is a single entity, uniquely
identified by the email address. A **company** is a collection of
developers managed as a single entity.

Optionally, you can group multiple developers into companies based on business unit, product
line, division, or other corporate entity. For example, you may need to set up different
companies for billing purposes. If a developer is part of a company you'll see the Company name
on the Developers page.

The following figure illustrates the relationships between companies and developers.

![](https://docs.apigee.com/static/api-platform/images/company_developer.png)

Companies are configured with tax and billing data, including the billing type, which
specifies whether developers in the company will pay in advance for their API use (prepaid) or be
invoiced later (postpaid). Companies contain one or more developers, all of whom share the same
company tax and billing information.

Developers maintain a set of personal profile information, including a list of companies they
belong to (each of which determines how they are billed or paid). Developers can belong to more
than one company. For example, a developer can have their own company for which they pay to use
your APIs, and they can also belong to another company you've partnered with in a revenue-sharing
relationship to create apps for your services.

Developers in your organization don't need to be associated with a company.

Developers can be created but not deleted on organizations with monetization enabled.

## How companies and developers are managed

The ecosystem of companies and developers can grow large and require constant maintenance,
such as onboarding new developers, updating profile information, and managing user roles. As an
API provider, managing company and developer updates could become a full-time job for someone on
your team.

To enable companies and developers to manage company and developer updates themselves, Apigee
has integrated monetization into the developer portal. Between the developer portal and the Edge
management UI and API, you can strike a manageable balance between providing self-service and
managing company and developer updates yourself.

**Self-service** : By providing a self-service developer portal, your developers
and companies can register and manage themselves, register their apps, and select the monetized
API packages they want to use. For more information, see [Managing companies and
developers using the developer portal (self-service)](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/monetization/companies-developers-self-service).

**Manual control** : If you want more control over the companies and developers
that participate in your monetized API program---for example, if you want to create in-house
companies and developers for testing purposes---you can create companies and developers
manually with the management UI and API. For more information, see [Managing companies and
developers using Edge](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/monetization/companies-and-developers-manage-manually).

Regardless of whether you delegate company and developer management with a self-service portal
or maintain your own control over company and developer creation and management---or some
combination of both---Edge lets you analyze API traffic and automatically calculates
monetization costs (what developers owe you and what you owe developers).

## Next Steps

Review the following topics to manage companies and developers:

- [Managing
  companies and developers using the developer portal (self-service)](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/monetization/companies-developers-self-service)
- [Managing
  companies and developers using Edge](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/monetization/companies-and-developers-manage-manually)
- [Migrating
  developers to monetization](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/monetization/migrating-developers-monetization)
- [Manage developer
  categories](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/monetization/manage-developer-categories)
- [Unsuspend
  developers](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/monetization/unsuspend-developers)