Nothing can stifle development faster than putting a price tag on the development tools for your product. A case in point is email provider iContact who for whatever reason requires developers to register for a $9.95 per month account to create an application on their platform. Imagine for a minute how different the Facebook ecosystem would have been if they had charged developers to integrate with Platform. Many of iContact’s competitors including those featured on the iContact website, Constant Contact and Bronto, provide easy access to their development API’s. I don’t know if there’s a correlation, but these providers have been continuing to grow while iContact’s growth has remained relatively flat over the last 6 months.

There are business reasons why it’s probably important to control what applications make it onto a platform. Quality control, security of client data, inability to handle scale are all good reasons to keep people out. If this is what you need to do – don’t offer a public API.

The spectrum of current solutions for controlling access is varied. Apple’s often criticized application review process is one way to ensure that only “quality” applications become available to clients. On the other extreme, also not without criticism, Facebook’s more capitalistic approach allows users to ultimately decide what applications to use and thus drives the ecosystem from the other direction. Interestingly, regardless of the application approval process issues, anyone can create a FREE developer accounts, explore and interact with the SDK and Facebook API and start building applications. In fact, according to Alexa, only 2 of the Top 20 US Web Properties (ESPN and Disney’s GO) don’t offer free access to their API.

I strongly advise iContact and any other parties who sell their software as a service to provide an environment that encourages developers to interact with your service or don’t bother at all. Allowing developers to add value to your clients will always result in a happier customer and may even give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace, especially one as heavily saturated as email marketing.