Zong

Zong was a mobile carrier-billing micropayments company that let consumers buy digital goods, apps, and content and charge them directly to their mobile phone bill, without entering credit-card details. Founded in 2008 (spun out of Echovox) and led by CEO David Marcus, Zong was backed by Matrix Partners and NewMargin Ventures and published a developer API for selling and delivering content to mobile customers worldwide. eBay acquired Zong in 2011 for roughly $240M and folded its technology into PayPal; the brand went offline around May 2015 and zong.com now redirects to PayPal. The company is defunct and operates no live API or developer platform today.

Zong is profiled on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Fintech, Payments, Mobile Payments, and Carrier Billing.

📡 Source on GitHub
0.0/100 minimal Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-09-25 · rubric v0.23.0
0 APIs
CompanyFintechPaymentsMobile PaymentsCarrier BillingMicropaymentsDefunctAcquired

Kin Score

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-25 · rubric v0.23.0
Composite quality — 0.0/100 · minimal
Contract Quality 0.0 / 21
Developer Ergonomics 0.0 / 17
Access Clarity 0.0 / 17
Operational Transparency 0.0 / 11
Contract Governance 0.0 / 10
Discoverability 0.0 / 9
Regulatory Posture 0.0 / 15
Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only
Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10
Documented Reversibility 0 / 6
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3
A2A Agent Card 0 / 8
Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4
Delegated User Identity 0 / 6
Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5
Registration Without a Human 0 / 6
Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5
Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Payments regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.
Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.
The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.
Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/zong: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Source (apis.yml)

apis.yml Raw ↑ 
aid: zong
deliveryModel:
  model: unknown
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
  confidence: low
  source:
  - none
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/zong.png
name: Zong
description: Zong was a mobile carrier-billing micropayments company that let consumers buy digital goods, apps, and content
  and charge them directly to their mobile phone bill, without entering credit-card details. Founded in 2008 (spun out of
  Echovox) and led by CEO David Marcus, Zong was backed by Matrix Partners and NewMargin Ventures and published a developer
  API for selling and delivering content to mobile customers worldwide. eBay acquired Zong in 2011 for roughly $240M and folded
  its technology into PayPal; the brand went offline around May 2015 and zong.com now redirects to PayPal. The company is
  defunct and operates no live API or developer platform today.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/zong/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- matrix-partners
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
x-status: defunct
x-status-detail: Acquired by eBay in 2011 and folded into PayPal; brand offline since ~2015, zong.com redirects to PayPal.
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-21'
tags:
- Company
- Fintech
- Payments
- Mobile Payments
- Carrier Billing
- Micropayments
- Defunct
- Acquired
apis: []
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-21'
  status: nochange
  artifacts_added: 0
  pass: local-v1

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