Tyk Developer Portal

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Introduction

The Tyk Developer Portal is a comprehensive solution designed for API providers who want to publish, monetize, and drive adoption of their APIs. It offers a flexible, full-featured CMS-like system that supports all stages of the API adoption journey, from customizing the look and feel to exposing APIs and enabling third-party developers to register and utilize your APIs.


A note on spelling

Throughout this documentation, we use specific spelling conventions to help distinguish between product features and general concepts:

  • Organisation (with an ’s’) refers specifically to the entity within the Tyk Developer Portal (sometimes abbreviated to Org)
  • Organization (with a ‘z’) refers to real-world businesses or the general concept of organizing

This British/American English distinction helps clarify when we’re discussing the Tyk Developer Portal feature versus general organizational concepts.

Key Capabilities

The Developer Portal enables you to:

  • Completely customize the portal’s appearance to match your brand identity
  • Bundle related APIs into cohesive packages that deliver specific value to consumers
  • Provide comprehensive documentation including OpenAPI specifications, blogs, and tutorials
  • Segment your developer audience through multiple Organisation and Teams
  • Tailor API visibility with multiple catalogs showing different offerings to different audiences
  • Integrate with popular Identity Providers via Dynamic Client Registration
  • Control the developer experience with customizable sign-up and enrollment flows
  • Monitor API usage with comprehensive analytics

API Monetization with Tyk Developer Portal

The Tyk Developer Portal does not include built-in billing or payment processing for monetizing APIs. However, you can implement monetization strategies through:

  • Usage-based billing: The traffic logs generated by Tyk Gateway can be associated with access credentials assigned to Developer Apps, allowing for external calculation and billing based on API usage.
  • Tiered access plans: Create different API Plans with varying usage limits and capabilities that correspond to different pricing tiers.
  • Manual subscription management: Track subscriptions to API Plans in an external system and manually approve/revoke access based on payment status.

If you require integrated API monetization, you can implement a custom integration between the Developer Portal and your billing system using the Portal’s webhook system.

Where It Fits in the Tyk Ecosystem

The Developer Portal serves as the bridge between your API infrastructure and your developer community. It serves as a central hub where API providers can publish their offerings and API consumers can discover, learn about, and access those APIs.

The Developer Portal connects to one or more instances of the Tyk Dashboard (referred to as “Providers”). Each Tyk Dashboard provides access to:

  • API definitions that configure the Gateway to manage traffic to your upstream services
  • Security policies that define access rights and rate limits
  • Authentication mechanisms for securing API access

The API owner bundles API definitions into API Products, which are then published to specific audiences in API Catalogs. They create Subscription Plans that use security policies to control granular access, for example, gold, silver, and bronze tiers.

When an API consumer discovers an API Product they want to use, they request access through the Portal via a Subscription Plan. Once approved (either automatically or by an administrator), the Developer Portal issues a provisioning request to the relevant Tyk Dashboard, which then generates the necessary access credentials (API keys, OAuth tokens, etc.).

This separation between the Developer Portal and the Tyk Dashboard creates a clean distinction between:

  • API Management - how you define, secure, and monitor your APIs (handled by Tyk Dashboard)
  • API Publishing - how you present, document, and provide access to your APIs (handled by Developer Portal)

This architecture enables you to maintain a consistent developer experience, even if your backend API infrastructure spans multiple environments or utilizes different configurations.

Getting Started

To begin using the Tyk Developer Portal:

Getting Access

The Tyk Enterprise Developer Portal is a licensed product. If you’re interested in getting access, please contact us at [email protected]

See also

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