apigatewaycost.com
SHEET 01 / API GATEWAY COST REFERENCE
Sheet 12 / Comparison Detail

Apigee vs Kong,
priced at your scale.

Both are enterprise API management platforms, but they meter completely differently. Apigee charges per million calls plus a monthly environment fee. Kong Konnect charges per gateway plus a steep per-million overage, then pushes you to custom Enterprise pricing above 10M requests/month. Below: both price lists verified against the vendor pages in June 2026, with worked totals at three volumes.

Δ Quick verdict

Under ~3M requests/month, Kong Konnect is cheaper ($25 to $200/month vs Apigee’s $385+ environment floor). From ~5M to 50M/month, Apigee pay-as-you-go is cheaper because Kong’s $200-per-extra-million overage outpaces Apigee’s $20/million. Above that, the contest is Apigee PAYG vs Kong Enterprise (quote) or self-hosted Kong OSS, where engineering time, not license fees, decides it.

Spec / Pricing Models

Side by side: every tier, June 2026 list pricing

DimensionApigee (Google Cloud)Kong
Free entry pointEvaluation: free 60-day sandbox, non-productionKonnect free trial: 30 days, no gateway limits. Kong Gateway OSS: free forever (Apache 2.0)
Usage-based tierPay-as-you-go. Standard API Proxy: $20/M (to 50M), $16/M (50M to 500M), $13/M (500M+). Extensible API Proxy: $100/M / $80/M / $64/M same bandsKonnect Plus: 1M requests/mo included, then $200/mo per additional 1M, hard cap 10M/mo
Fixed monthly feesEnvironment, per region: Base $365/mo (50 QPS cap), Intermediate $1,460/mo (100 QPS), Comprehensive $3,431/mo (autoscaled)Per gateway control plane: Serverless $25/mo, Hybrid $200/mo, Dedicated Cloud $500/mo + $0.15/GB bandwidth
Enterprise tierSubscription: Standard (to 1.25B Standard proxy calls), Enterprise (to 7.5B), Enterprise Plus (to 75B). All quote-onlyKonnect Enterprise: custom pricing, billed annually, unlimited gateways. Self-hosted Gateway Enterprise: custom
SLAUp to 99% (Base/Intermediate), 99.9% one region, 99.99% two regions (Comprehensive)Konnect control plane 99.9%; Dedicated Cloud Gateways 99.99%; OSS self-managed
Self-host optionHybrid entitlements on paid tiers onlyYes: Kong Gateway OSS at $0 license, any infrastructure

Apigee rates: cloud.google.com/apigee/pricing. Kong rates: konghq.com/pricing. Both fetched and verified 9 June 2026. Apigee call rates assume Standard API Proxies; fully programmable Extensible proxies cost 5x more per call.

Worked Examples / TCO

Total monthly cost at three volumes

Assumptions: single region, Standard API Proxies on Apigee, one Hybrid gateway on Kong (the typical production choice; a Serverless gateway is $175/month cheaper). Data transfer excluded on both (Apigee bills Google Cloud networking separately; Konnect Hybrid traffic flows through your own data plane).

1M req / month

Apigee PAYG

Calls (1M x $20/M)$20
Base environment$365
Total$385

Kong Konnect Plus

Hybrid gateway$200
Requests (1M included)$0
Total$200

■ KONG WINS ($25 on Serverless)

10M req / month

Apigee PAYG

Calls (10M x $20/M)$200
Base environment$365
Total$565

Kong Konnect Plus

Hybrid gateway$200
Overage (9M x $200/M)$1,800
Total$2,000

■ APIGEE WINS (3.5x cheaper)

100M req / month

Apigee PAYG

Calls (50M x $20 + 50M x $16)$1,800
Intermediate environment$1,460
Total$3,260

Kong (self-hosted OSS)

License$0
Infra + 16-24 hrs/mo eng.$1,800-$2,600
Total~$2,200

■ CLOSE (depends on eng. cost)

100M/month exceeds Konnect Plus’s 10M cap, so the managed Kong path is Konnect Enterprise (quote-only). The self-hosted figures use the infrastructure and engineering estimates from our Kong pricing breakdown: ~$218/month infrastructure plus 16 to 24 hours/month at $100/hr. Apigee’s 100M example uses the Intermediate environment; steady traffic under the 50 QPS cap could stay on Base ($365/mo) for a $2,165 total.

Verdict / Selection Criteria

When each one wins

■ Choose Apigee when

  • You monetize APIs as a product: rate plans, revenue share and developer billing are built in
  • Your stack is already on Google Cloud (IAM, Cloud Armor, Cloud Logging integrate natively)
  • You want zero infrastructure to run: Google manages the gateway fleet entirely
  • Sustained volume sits in the 5M to 100M calls/month band where PAYG beats Konnect list pricing
  • Procurement prefers one Google Cloud bill over a new vendor relationship

■ Choose Kong when

  • Multi-cloud or on-prem is non-negotiable: the data plane runs anywhere, including air-gapped
  • You are Kubernetes-native and want the Kong Ingress Controller plus 300+ plugins
  • Traffic is small (under ~3M req/month fits Konnect Plus for $25 to $200/month)
  • You have platform engineers and want the $0-license OSS path at high volume
  • You need gRPC, Kafka, WebSockets or LLM/AI gateway routing in one product

The honest middle ground: both vendors steer real production workloads toward quote-only tiers (Apigee Subscription, Konnect Enterprise). List prices above are the ceiling. At $5,000+/month equivalent volume, negotiate both and make them bid against each other. Run your own numbers in the cost calculator.

Cross-References

Related sheets

Apigee pricing in full

Every Apigee tier, monetization features, and worked examples vs AWS.

Kong pricing in full

Konnect, Enterprise and the true cost of running OSS yourself.

Cost calculator

Enter your volume and payload size, rank all six providers instantly.

Frequently Specified

Questions answered on this sheet

Q01.Which is cheaper, Apigee or Kong?+
It depends on volume. At 1M requests/month Kong is cheaper: Konnect Plus runs $25 to $200/month (one gateway, 1M requests included) vs Apigee pay-as-you-go at roughly $385/month ($20 in call fees plus a $365/month Base environment). At 10M requests/month the order flips: Apigee costs around $565/month while Konnect Plus reaches $1,825 to $2,000/month because each additional million requests costs $200. Above 10M, Kong forces you onto Konnect Enterprise (custom pricing) or self-hosted Kong, where license cost is zero but engineering time dominates.
Q02.How much does Apigee cost per month in 2026?+
Apigee pay-as-you-go has two meters: API calls and environments. Standard API Proxy calls cost $20/million (up to 50M/month), $16/million (50M to 500M) and $13/million above 500M. Extensible API Proxy calls cost $100/million, $80/million and $64/million across the same bands. On top of calls you pay for at least one environment: Base $365/month/region (50 QPS cap), Intermediate $1,460/month/region (100 QPS) or Comprehensive $3,431/month/region (autoscaled). A realistic entry-level production bill is $385 to $600/month. Subscription tiers (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus) are quote-only.
Q03.How much does Kong Konnect cost in 2026?+
Kong Konnect Plus is billed per gateway control plane per month: Serverless gateways $25/month (up to 5), Hybrid gateways $200/month (up to 2), Dedicated Cloud Gateways $500/month plus $0.15/GB bandwidth (up to 2). The plan includes 1 million API requests/month; each additional million costs $200/month, with a hard cap of 10 million requests/month. Beyond 10M you need Konnect Enterprise, which is custom-priced and billed annually with volume discounts.
Q04.Is Kong Gateway OSS really free?+
Yes. Kong Gateway OSS is Apache 2.0 licensed with no usage limits and no feature expiry, so the license cost is zero at any volume. The real cost is operations: roughly $200 to $500/month of infrastructure for a production HA setup plus 16 to 24 hours/month of platform engineering for upgrades, plugin debugging and config management. Fully self-hosted gateways with enterprise features (RBAC dashboard, audit logs, FIPS) fall under Kong's separate Gateway Enterprise offering, which is custom-priced.
Q05.Does Kong have anything like Apigee's API monetization?+
Kong added metering and billing to Konnect: ingested events cost $20/million events and invoice billing costs 0.4% of billed volume. It is newer and thinner than Apigee's monetization engine, which includes rate plan templates, revenue share, developer self-service billing and product bundling, and is bundled into Apigee's pay-as-you-go and subscription tiers. If selling API access is your core business model, Apigee's monetization stack is still the more complete product.
Q06.Should I pick Apigee or Kong for multi-cloud?+
Kong. Apigee runs on Google Cloud (with hybrid entitlements on paid tiers), while Kong's data plane deploys anywhere: AWS, Azure, GCP, on-prem or Kubernetes via the Kong Ingress Controller, with 300+ plugins. Pick Apigee when you are already on Google Cloud, want fully managed infrastructure, or need its monetization and analytics. Pick Kong when you need deployment flexibility, gRPC and Kafka support, or want a zero-license-cost OSS path.
Verified June 2026: Apigee rates from cloud.google.com/apigee/pricing, Kong rates from konghq.com/pricing, both fetched 9 June 2026. Quote-only tiers (Apigee Subscription, Konnect Enterprise, Gateway Enterprise) are negotiated; treat list rates as ceilings. Not affiliated with Google Cloud or Kong, Inc. See also: all providers ranked, Google Cloud API Gateway pricing, self-hosted vs managed.

Updated 2026-06-09