Happy holidays from the Kong team! Consider this our gift to everyone who's been asked "what's the ROI on AI?" one too many times.
The AI boom has a dirty secret: for most enterprises, it's bleeding money.
Every LLM call, every agent invocation, every API request that powers your AI products — they all cost something. And right now, most organizations have no idea what they're spending, who's spending it, or how to control that spend. Finance teams are flying blind. Product teams can't price what they can't measure. And the C-suite is left wondering when "AI transformation" will stop being a line item and start being a profit driver.
Today, we're changing that. Kong is bringing metering, billing, and cost governance directly into Kong Konnect, giving you the tools to finally treat AI like what it should be: a business.
Here's the pattern we see over and over:
The issue isn't the AI itself — it's the infrastructure gap. Traditional API management was built for a world of predictable, flat-rate access. But AI workloads are different: token-based, usage-variable, model-dependent, and expensive. Without purpose-built metering and billing, you can't:
And standalone billing and monetization platforms? They can meter. They can bill. But they can't enforce. When a customer burns through their quota or an internal team blows past their budget, these platforms will tell you about it — after the damage is done. Real cost governance means enforcing usage limits at runtime, in real-time, in accordance with subscriptions and entitlements. That requires living at the connectivity layer, not sitting alongside it.
And here's what often gets missed: your APIs are part of your AI strategy too.
The backend services, data APIs, and integration endpoints that power your AI products all contribute to your cost structure — and your monetization opportunity. You can't have a complete AI business model if you're only metering and enforcing limits at the LLM layer while ignoring the APIs that feed it.
Konnect Metering & Billing brings a full monetization and cost governance engine into the same platform that already manages your APIs, AI gateways, and event streams. That means:
We’ve focused first on bringing the much-loved OpenMeter Cloud functionality directly into Konnect (ICYMI: Kong acquired OpenMeter in September) before building net-new Metering & Billing functionality — more coming soon though!
Today, you can use Konnect Metering and Billing to:
Define and manage multiple kinds of pricing models: one-time and recurring fees
For more information on how all of these pricing models work, check out this blog.
Integrate with your ERP and billing systems to generate invoices and drive proper chargeback
And, of course, you can natively tie certain meters to specific Konnect Gateways and Gateway services so that you can map monetization plans onto your existing API and AI Gateway configuration plans (i.e., tie rate limits to certain usage entitlements).
This means that, as of today, you can use Konnect Metering & Billing to both monetize and govern API and AI program cost structures — all in the same place where you manage your API and AI infrastructure.
There are many different stakeholders involved in an organization’s AI monetization and cost governance strategies. And Konnect Metering can help them all:
The companies winning with AI aren't just the ones building the best models. They're the ones treating AI as a product, with real unit economics, real pricing discipline, and real margin accountability.
That requires infrastructure. Specifically, it requires metering and billing that understands the full AI data path — from the agent layer, through your APIs, all the way down to the backend services, LLMs, and data sources that power it.
Most organizations approach this piecemeal: one tool for LLM cost tracking, another for API analytics, a billing platform that can invoice but can't enforce, and spreadsheets to reconcile it all. That's not FinOps, and it's certainly not unified cost governance. That's just chaos with a budget code.
Konnect Metering & Billing gives you the foundation to drive larger AI and business margins the right way: unified metering, unified billing, unified governance across AI and APIs alike, with enforcement that happens at runtime, not in a post-mortem.
Learn more and get started
Want to learn more? We’ll be back with much more on this topic after the holidays, so stay tuned! In the meantime, Konnect Metering & Billing is available now. You can start for free or get a personalized demo. Or, for a deeper dive, check out the docs.
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