> In my opinion, enterprise pricing is an absolute racket.
That's one way of looking at it I guess. The other way of looking at it is that every company that doesn't charge each customer exactly what they can pay rather than something possibly less, is leaving money on the table.
And an even scarier way of looking at it—or at least, one that should be scarier to you, as the API provider: if you charge a customer less than they’re willing to pay, then an “enterprise services” middleman will come along, and resell your product for what it’s actually worth to these customers, and capture all the profit.
It’s analogous to selling tickets: if you charge less than the market will bear, scalpers will come along and buy them all up, and then make all the profit you could have made reselling the tickets for what they’re “actually worth.”
If you're keeping your operation fairly small and you haven't brought on any sales staff, I think those "enterprise service" middlemen can be really helpful.
It took no effort on your part to get those additional users. It might be indirect, but for a purely API service, I don't think it makes a great difference.
The risk would be if they implement some layer over your API service and then down the road shift it to another provider. To avoid that, I would actually try to find and partner with any such resellers to make sure they stick with you.
That's one way of looking at it I guess. The other way of looking at it is that every company that doesn't charge each customer exactly what they can pay rather than something possibly less, is leaving money on the table.