No walled gardens: Amazon reversed its Seller Partner API fees

In November 2025, Amazon told developers it would start charging them to use the Selling Partner API. The Selling Partner API (SP-API) had been free since 2009. The plan was a $1,400 annual subscription per developer, plus usage fees of $0.40 for every 1,000 GET calls once you crossed a tier limit. The subscription was set to start January 31, 2026, and the usage fees on April 30, 2026.

By May 2026, Amazon dropped all of it.

This is good news, and it is worth understanding why it happened, because the same thing can happen with other vendors.

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What happened

The SP-API powers the tools sellers use to run their Amazon business - inventory, pricing, order management, advertising, reporting, and analytics. More than 2,500 applications are built on it, serving over 1.4 million sellers across 20-plus countries. For 16 years, that access was free.

The fee plan landed in November. The backlash was immediate. Amazon delayed the start date in January after pushback from developers and large agencies. In March, it postponed the fees indefinitely. In May, it told developers it would not move forward with them at all.

Amazon's own note was short, saying the company had announced changes to developer fees, that it valued the feedback on those changes, and that it would not move forward with the SP-API usage and annual fees "at this time."

How the community pushed back and got it reversed

The math did not work for the teams who build on the API. Mid-sized developers were looking at tens of thousands of dollars a year, with single-month bills as high as $2,200 once overage charges kicked in. Smaller developers would have been pushed out entirely. And the cost would not have stopped there - every tool vendor would have passed it on to sellers. A fee aimed at the developer ecosystem was really a tax on the millions of businesses that run on Amazon.

So the community pushed back, publicly and through every channel they had. We added our voice too. 

Amazon listened.

That is the part worth sitting with. A change that looked locked in was reversed because the community made enough noise. Pressure works. These decisions are not permanent, and vendors do respond when the people who depend on them speak up.

This matters beyond Amazon

Amazon is not the only vendor to have attempted this kind of move. Across enterprise software, access to your own data is getting harder and more expensive to use anywhere outside the vendor's own product, essentially creating walled gardens. It usually shows up in one of a few ways:

• API access is available as an add-on, not a default, out-of-the-box offering. Sometimes vendors will charge per API call, making it prohibitively expensive for customers to extract their data. 
• Low rate limits combined with poorly designed APIs make data replication impossible.
• Limiting access or use cases in user agreements or terms of service

We have seen each of these from major vendors in the last two years. SAP moved to block third-party use of its data replication API. Slack rewrote its API terms to bar bulk export and any use of Slack data to train AI. Workday is moving to a credit model where API usage draws from a metered pool. AI raises the stakes. Agents make thousands of calls where a person made ten, so a rate limit or a per-call fee that was a nuisance for reporting becomes a hard wall for anything an AI agent needs to do. The vendors making these changes are betting their customers will accept them. Amazon shows that bet does not always hold. When an ecosystem holds a vendor accountable, the vendor can change course.

Fivetran’s perspective on data access

We believe your data is yours, and you should be able to move it and use it wherever you want, without paying a toll at every step. That belief is the reason the company exists.

It is also why we built the Open Data Infrastructure Data Access Benchmark. We score major vendors in public on three things: whether your core data is programmatically accessible, whether they support moving it at scale, and whether you can get it out without fees or restrictive terms. The point is to give customers something concrete to point at, so the pressure has data behind it. When Amazon rolled back its fees, we updated the Selling Partner score to reflect it: no unusual egress conditions.

We are glad to see people taking an interest in holding these vendors accountable, because it shows change is possible. The more customers and ecosystems push, the more vendors will choose to make data easy to reach instead of finding new ways to charge for it. That is a better outcome for everyone - sellers, developers, and the companies that depend on this data to run.

Check how your vendors score on the ODI Data Access Benchmark: opendatainfrastructure.com.

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