Kong Acquires OpenMeter to Bring API and AI Monetization to the Agentic Era

Today, we’re announcing that Kong has acquired OpenMeter, the open source and SaaS leader for real-time usage metering and billing. OpenMeter’s capabilities will be integrated into Kong Konnect, enabling usage-based pricing, entitlements, and invoicing for APIs, events, and AI workloads. This is a huge milestone for Kong, and we’re excited about what this means for our customers and the future of how you build and scale revenue-generating digital products for the agentic AI era.

What does OpenMeter do?

OpenMeter provides a leading developer-friendly solution for tying together real-time usage data, billing infrastructure, and feature access management. It helps you understand exactly how your digital products are consumed and translates that usage into billable events and invoices. This usage information can also be used to drive real-time feature enablement or quota enforcement, which is critical in any cloud and AI product. It’s a powerful technology for anyone looking to move beyond traditional subscription models and unlock the potential of usage-based pricing, whether that’s for internal showback and chargeback or direct billing to external customers.

We’re incredibly excited to welcome Peter Marton, András Tóth, and the entire team that built OpenMeter to Kong, and we’ll be immediately increasing the team size. Their deep expertise in metering and billing will be instrumental in helping our customers unlock the full revenue potential of their APIs and AI products.

Why is this a big deal for Kong customers?

We consistently hear from our customers that they need robust, built-in monetization capabilities to translate API usage into revenue-generating products and/or understand the true costs of operating services for their customers. The needs have increased since the launch of our new Konnect Developer Portal, with Product Managers now building developer-focused storefronts that demand subscriptions and tiering that seamlessly integrates with our API, Event, and AI Gateways.

More broadly, LLMs and agentic workflows — while promising — also stand to increase operating cost structures. Every business is struggling to wrangle the spiking costs of LLM usage for employees and applications. While many AI and LLM vendors offer native quotas and cost tracking, most organizations are experimenting with dozens of LLM vendors, tools, models, and even GPU infrastructure for their own real-time inference or training models — eliminating the ability to centrally control for and understand costs. Successful AI deployments require comprehensive billing insights to truly understand the Costs of Goods Sold (COGS) across more than one AI solution.

To meet the needs of our customers today and tomorrow, Kong needed to look beyond traditional API analytics and basic API monetization experiences and instead offer powerful usage-based billing, tiering, and subscription control for their entire digital product ecosystem. With this new technology, Kong positions itself as the leading unified platform, not just for managing APIs, events, and AI services, but for unlocking the full economic potential of your digital products in the agentic era.

Why OpenMeter?

Over the last year, we’ve closely evaluated dozens of usage-based metering, billing, and invoicing technologies and vendors on the market. Our requirements seemed simple:

• Developer-friendly: Kong engineers hold a high bar for technology and are API-first when designing their own systems. Any technology we adopted needed well-crafted automation experiences powered by APIs and flexible SDKs
• Real-time usage-based metering: We needed to be able to stream a variety of events and turn them into billable metrics at the whim of both our product managers and our customers. Seat-based subscription models just don’t work anymore, and especially not for our customers.
• Flexible product catalog: Kong customers are innovators — we knew that they would not just need the ability to compose products from billable metrics, but also the ability to quickly adjust and experiment with pricing models, credits, and subscriptions.
• Extensible architecture: Built-in Stripe Payment integration was table stakes, but we knew we would need external invoicing, webhook integrations, and real-time entitlement enforcement to power integrations into our connectivity runtimes.
• Scaling and enterprise readiness: Kong powers APIs for the world's largest enterprises and leading technology companies. Any solution needed to be able to support the workload our customers would throw at it while meeting their intense regulatory requirements.
• Ideally built on open source: Kong was founded on open source, and we believe in the power of open source communities under a permissive and corporate-friendly license.

Ultimately, only OpenMeter met our requirements, and the underlying technology was a great fit to our approach to building scalable systems. But as we got to know Peter and András better, we realized this was a better-together story:

The OpenMeter team has powerful technology, critical product features, and deep industry expertise. The Kong Konnect unified API platform offers a global and enterprise-ready environment composed of industry-leading connectivity runtimes and SaaS applications powering hundreds of global customers. Offering an OpenMeter product experience on Konnect with deep integrations to Kong Gateway, Kong Event Gateway, Kong AI Gateway, and our Developer Portal fundamentally changes the game for our mutual customers.

What's next?

Nothing is changing for existing OpenMeter Cloud customers or their community. You can continue to use the product as you always have and the project will remain open source under an Apache 2.0 license. We’re increasing investments in the team and technology right away. Over the coming months, we’ll be integrating OpenMeter's capabilities directly into Kong Konnect. This will offer the metering and billing experience that your developers love on top of a global, enterprise-ready, cloud platform.

For Kong customers, get excited about a powerful new universal usage-based billing capability coming to Kong Konnect, seamlessly integrated with other Kong products, including Kong Gateway, Kong AI Gateway, Kong Event Gateway, and the Kong Konnect Developer Portal.

If you want to see what the unified solution will look like, make sure to attend API Summit in October, where we’ll be hosting multiple sessions around monetization and the future of Kong + OpenMeter. Can’t wait? Be first in line to get hands-on with the new product by signing up to join our beta program.

To the talented team at OpenMeter — welcome to Kong! And to our valued customers, community, and partners: get ready. We’re committed to building on OpenMeter's innovation and delivering even greater value together.