How Chenosis built a monetisable, developer-friendly API ecosystem with DAC

Chenosis is Africa’s leading API marketplace and ecosystem, enabling businesses, developers, and service providers to discover, publish, and monetise APIs at scale. As a subsidiary of the MTN Group, Chenosis plays a central role in driving digital innovation across the continent by simplifying access to telco, fintech, healthtech, and enterprise APIs. With a mission to build an open and inclusive API economy, Chenosis empowers organisations across Africa to accelerate digital transformation through seamless API access.

The Challenge

Chenosis faced critical friction points in its developer portal experience that hindered its growth ambitions. Despite having a broad catalogue of APIs and a strong market position, the platform suffered from a lack of continuity between its public storefront and its developer portal.

Users were forced to navigate disconnected systems with rigid login rules, which created a jarring and inconsistent experience. While, the absence of single sign-on (SSO) capabilities meant that transitions between sub-sites were not seamless, disrupting the user journey and leading to drop-offs.

Payment gateway integration was another major roadblock. The platform’s inability to support dynamic monetisation models, such as freemium or volume-based pricing, limited its ability to attract and convert users. API access controls were inflexible, with no granular visibility settings, preventing tailored experiences for different user groups or partners. This restricted access also slowed down experimentation and onboarding, especially for developers exploring new APIs.

On top of that, user retention suffered due to the lack of exclusive content pathways, poor engagement tooling, and limited backend controls for admins. Admins could not easily define access policies, create user groups, or manage comment moderation features critical for both security and community building. Altogether, these technical and experiential limitations resulted in underutilised APIs, stagnating revenue growth, and prolonged delays in delivering on Chenosis’ product roadmap.

DAC’s Solution

To address Chenosis’ fragmented API experience, monetisation limitations, and developer retention challenges, DigitalAPICraft deployed a comprehensive, multi-layered solution. The focus was on enabling a seamless API journey from discovery and access to monetisation and analytics, backed by advanced admin control and support for global scalability. DAC’s out-of-the-box capabilities helped Chenosis revamp both the frontend and backend of their API marketplace, aligning with MTN’s multi-country ambitions.

1. One unified API marketplace

DAC provided Chenosis with a robust API marketplace and developer portal that streamlined discovery, documentation, self-service onboarding, access management, and communications. The portal was rebranded and tailored for multi-country and multi-gateway support, which was critical for Chenosis’ regional operations. It also supported different API types and instance-level configurations, enabling modular growth.

2. End-to-end API monetization

DAC integrated an advanced monetisation add-on supporting flexible pricing models, usage-based billing, and multiple currency transactions. This allowed Chenosis to introduce “free,” “freemium,” and volume-based monetisation tiers. DAC’s connectors to various global payment gateways and external billing systems made international processing seamless and scalable.

3. Smart API sandbox

To improve developer onboarding and reduce testing friction, DAC deployed an open API sandbox with smart, transactional simulation capabilities. Developers could now test APIs under stateful, seeded, static, or proxy-based conditions mirroring real-world use cases and speeding up experimentation cycles.

4. Analytics and usage reporting

With DAC Analytics, Chenosis gained deep insights into both developer behaviour and platform performance. Some of its features included web portal analytics (user geo-grouping, page-level segmentation) and sandbox analytics. These insights informed both product strategy and monetisation optimisation.

5. Advanced admin governance

DAC introduced granular admin capabilities that empowered the Chenosis team to control access, moderate content, manage login/register routes, and customise user journeys. Admins could now define groups, set visibility rules, and create exclusive experiences for partners or regions without engineering dependencies.

Business Outcome

With DAC, Chenosis reinvented its API marketplace to deliver a seamless, scalable, and monetisable developer experience across Africa. The upgraded platform not only accelerated time-to-market and improved engagement but also unlocked new revenue streams through smart API monetisation. Here’s how it delivered measurable impact:

• Unified the storefront and developer portal to enable a seamless user journey and reduce drop-offs.
• Launched a fully branded, multi-country API marketplace with support for various API types and gateway instances.
• Reduced onboarding friction by deploying a transactional API sandbox, boosting developer trial and integration rates.
• Enabled flexible monetisation models, including free, freemium, and volume-based, integrated with global payment gateways.
• Increased developer retention through exclusive content delivery, role-based access, and community moderation.
• Delivered actionable insights via advanced web and sandbox analytics, driving smarter content and monetisation decisions.
• Established admin-led control for login flows, API visibility, and content segmentation, reducing dependency on engineering.

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