Revenue Strategies for AI API Services

Strategy: "The Open-Source Trojan Horse" with Forced Upgrade Gating

Do not sell the APIs directly. Instead, open-source the most critical 10% of your 93 services (e.g., core authentication, basic data retrieval, or standard webhooks) as a free, self-hostable library or lightweight API gateway.

Execution Steps:

1. Pick 9–10 high-frequency, low-complexity APIs that are essential building blocks for any M2M integration (e.g., POST /v1/device/heartbeat, GET /v1/device/status, POST /v1/event/log).
2. Package them into a free, open-source