Kong adds usage-based billing capability

This pushed Kong up the stack from moving traffic to helping customers make money from that traffic. Before OpenMeter, Kong mainly sold the pipes and controls around APIs and AI requests. With Konnect Metering & Billing, the same control plane can count requests or tokens, apply plan rules, enforce entitlements, and turn that usage into invoices or internal chargebacks, which makes Kong part of the customer’s revenue workflow, not just their infrastructure workflow.

• The product is concrete. Teams can ingest usage events, define meters, attach rate cards with flat, tiered, or usage based pricing, create subscriptions, and generate invoices from billing profiles. Kong also ties meters to gateway services and routes, so access control and monetization live in one place.
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• That changes how Kong monetizes. Core Konnect pricing scales with gateways, regions, and traffic. Metering & Billing adds a take rate on billing volume processed, so revenue can rise when a customer commercializes more API or AI usage, even without adding more seats or gateways.
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• It also puts Kong into a new competitive set. Usage billing vendors like Orb, Metronome, and Lago sell the finance layer for API and AI products, while Kong can bundle that layer with the gateway that already sees every request. The advantage is fewer systems to stitch together for metering, entitlement checks, and invoicing.
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The next step is a broader shift from API management to monetization infrastructure for AI and agent traffic. As more companies charge by token, request, or outcome, the winner will be the platform that both governs usage in real time and converts it cleanly into billable revenue, and OpenMeter gives Kong a real path into that role.