API catalog and developer portal for teams already using Apigee or Kong

The moment arrives when a company has 40+ APIs spread across Apigee, an internal gateway, and a few direct Lambda endpoints, and a partner or third-party developer asks for a list of what's available. There is no clean answer. The gateway vendor's built-in portal exists but feels like an afterthought — users specifically call out that Apigee's developer portal 'does not feel fully mature' and that catalog capabilities are 'limited.' The reason this hasn't been fixed is structural: gateway vendors make money on traffic and policy enforcement, not on documentation UX. The portal is a checkbox feature, not a revenue driver, so it gets deprioritized indefinitely.

What's actually missing is a catalog layer that reads from whatever gateway or spec source a team already uses — pulling OpenAPI specs, traffic metadata, and ownership info — and renders it into something a third-party developer or internal team can navigate without needing a guided tour. The user complaining about wanting to 'expose it for 3rd parties to access the site' isn't asking for a new gateway; they're asking for a front door that doesn't require their partners to learn Apigee's admin console.

This is a business and not a feature because the need recurs every time a company adds a new API, onboards a new partner, or rotates a team. The portal isn't set-and-forget — it needs to stay in sync with what's actually deployed. A company running this without dedicated tooling either assigns an engineer to maintain a static docs site (expensive, always stale) or tells partners to read the gateway's raw interface (which they won't). Either way, API adoption stalls and partner onboarding takes weeks instead of hours.

What to build

Build a read-only catalog layer that ingests OpenAPI specs and gateway metadata from Apigee, Kong, and Amazon API Gateway via their management APIs, then generates a hosted, searchable developer portal with per-API access request workflows — requiring zero changes to the underlying gateway config.

Where to start

Start with companies already on Apigee who have complained publicly or in reviews about the immature developer portal — they have a known pain, a budget already allocated to Apigee, and a clear internal champion (the API product manager) who is embarrassed every time a partner onboarding call turns into a scavenger hunt.

The hard part

Keeping the catalog in sync with live gateway state is the core technical and trust problem — if the portal shows an endpoint that was deprecated last week, partners build against it and then it breaks, and the portal gets the blame; solving this requires tight polling or webhook integration with each gateway's management API, and those APIs are inconsistently designed.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription tiered by number of published APIs — starts at a low flat rate for up to 25 APIs, scales up per tier; one-time setup fee for enterprise customers who need SSO or custom domain configuration.