Health Sector API Marketplace

The marketplace already existed. I was asked for a surface change, which meant a better catalogue and clearer pricing. The account model was the thing holding it back.

A marketplace that supports individual developers as well as companies has to carry both in every product, every plan, every invoice and every report. Nobody sees that cost until they publish one product with three tiers and find they now have six to keep up to date.

Everything on this page is a recreation. The client is not named; their branding, real identifiers, customer data and internal documents are replaced with fictional equivalents built for this portfolio. Figures appear only where they describe my own process, and anything commercially sensitive is left out.

The marketplace, its products, its plans and every figure on these screens are fictional. The account-model argument is the real part.

Who owns an account

I argued for removing the personal account type and making the organisation the only kind of account. That is the model most developer marketplaces use.The argument was about how much there would be to maintain. With two account types, one product with three tiers becomes six products and six plans to configure, bill and report on. Every product added after that doubles in the same way.

The client pushed back for a concrete reason. They had hackathons and a researchers’ programme coming, and the people in those programmes are individuals who will never have a company behind them.That requirement outweighed the simpler model.

Plans people can read

The original structure had add-ons stacked on top of plans. In a joint workshop both teams agreed to drop them. Each product now has its own plans, one proxy, and tiers that line up across the catalogue.

That decision is what made the pricing tab legible. A plan card states the rate limit, the upfront cost and the per-call cost together. One plan is marked as recommended, and anyone whose volume does not fit a card is sent to the enterprise route. A reader does not have to add anything up to find the price.

One product, three tabs

Every product page has the same three tabs: what it does, how to call it, and what it costs. Overview carries the marketing case, Documentation carries the reference, and Pricing carries the plans. They are tabs because three different people read them, often in different meetings.

I tightened registration, verification, password reset and team invitations at the same time. The model only works if getting the second person from a company into the account is easy.

What this was and wasn’t

I did not start this product. A design for it already existed and had sat unbuilt for a long time, and I took it over. I do not know who made it and I never worked with them. There was no written design system and nobody to ask, so I worked the rules out from the screens that already existed and designed everything new to fit them.