Amazon’s SP-API Changes Raise Costs — But Our Goal Is Making Sure Sellers Don’t Pay Them

Amazon’s SP-API fees are reshaping the economics of repricing — and exposing which tools can actually withstand the new data reality.

Amazon’s new SP-API fee structure is more than a policy update. It’s a fundamental shift in the economics of building software on the marketplace. A mandatory annual subscription, usage-based tiers, and variable overage costs now sit on top of every GET call a tool makes.

For most categories, this is inconvenient. For certain tools, it’s existential.

A repricer is its API behavior. Speed, precision, and responsiveness aren’t marketing claims — they’re the physics of the system. You can’t “optimize around” data access without damaging the product itself.

That’s why we’ve spent the past weeks knee-deep in logs, replaying pricing events, modeling call paths, and interrogating every component of our architecture. Not just to tally up the fee impact — but to engineer a future where we’re not pushing these new costs onto our customers.

Why This Change Hits Repricers Harder Than Everyone Else

Most tools can absorb slower polling, heavier caching, or reduced call frequency without breaking the core value.

Repricers can’t.

Miss a price update event by 90 seconds, and the seller loses the sale. Delay a competitive price drop, and the margin window closes. Skip data during a velocity spike, and the product drifts.

Real-time pricing depends on:

• Continuous polling

• Instant reactivity

• Stable, predictable throughput

• Accurate state-tracking of multiple sellers and listings

• Low-latency decisioning

  
  

Every one of those requires GET calls. Which now carry an explicit cost.

Our Approach: Engineer Our Way Out, Not Charge Sellers More

Some companies will pass the fee through.Some will throttle frequency.Some will mask the impact until performance degrades.

We’re taking a different approach: attack the problem head-on at the architectural level.

Right now, we’re pressure-testing:

• Polling cadence and event-driven fallbacks

• Caching models that preserve precision without sacrificing freshness

• How we merge, dedupe, and compress state transitions

• Internal routing that dictates exactly when calls fire and why

• How often competitive states genuinely change in the wild

  
  

The goal isn’t to do less. The goal is to do exactly the right things — and nothing wasteful.

If we can engineer smarter systems that reduce structural load, we offset the new costs without sacrificing performance or increasing prices.

Why This Matters for Sellers

Any repricer can say they’re absorbing the costs. Very few can actually do it sustainably.

Tools built on brute-force polling will feel this immediately. Tools with legacy event handling will feel it next. And tools that never invested in understanding Amazon’s data behavior will struggle to evolve fast enough.

That’s where the separation happens — between platforms that survive this shift and platforms that keep pushing the industry forward.

What This Change Really Signals

This moment exposes a bigger truth: Amazon is tightening the ecosystem around data access — and that changes who can innovate.

Higher structural costs don’t just affect software companies. They shape which tools sellers rely on a year from now — and which ones disappear quietly.

The Real Question Sellers Should Be Asking

As SP-API becomes more expensive and more constrained, a new divide will emerge:

Who will win — tools that engineer through the constraints, or tools that pass the cost along and slow down?

That’s the question that will define the next era of the seller software ecosystem.