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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.
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).
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.
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: