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:

1. - Company invests heavily in AI capabilities
2. - Engineering builds impressive demos and internal tools
3. - Finance asks "what's the ROI?"
4. - Silence

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:

• - **Productize AI capabilities** for external customers or internal teams
• - **Real-time usage visibility** for customers, product and finance
• - **Enforce usage governance** before costs spiral out of control
• - **Price intelligently** based on actual consumption and value delivered

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:

• - **One platform for the entire AI data path: **Meter, price, govern, and bill across APIs, LLMs, MCP servers, and event streaming without stitching together point solutions. Your AI products and the APIs that power them, unified under one monetization layer.

• - **Supercharge your FinOps strategy**: If you're already investing in AI FinOps, this is the difference between just doing it and doing it well. While Konnect Metering and Billing isn’t a  FinOps tool, it does complement your larger AI FinOps practice. Real-time visibility into AI and API usage by customer, team, or product. Usage limits, quotas, and alerts that don't just report on overages — they prevent them. Because Konnect sits at the runtime layer, enforcement can happen in real-time, at the point of access, in accordance with each customer's subscriptions and entitlements. This difference between "we're doing FinOps" and "we're doing FinOps better than our competitors are."

• - **Flexible product catalog**: support multiple pricing models — usage-based, tiered, credits, subscriptions, or custom enterprise deals — for both AI-native products and traditional API offerings. No weeks of developer work required.

• - **Self-service and enterprise billing**: from PLG motions to negotiated contracts, one system handles invoicing, payment collection, and ERP integration.

We’ve focused first on bringing the much-loved OpenMeter Cloud functionality directly into Konnect (ICYMI: [Kong acquired OpenMeter in September](https://konghq.com/blog/news/kong-acquires-openmeter)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 AI and API resource consumption entitlements by setting feature gates and usage thresholds
• - Meter against those entitlements in real-time
• -

  Define and manage multiple kinds of pricing models: one-time and recurring fees

  • - Usage-based and tier-based pricing
  • - Volume-based pricing. The customer is billed based on the highest volume discount achieved. For example, a data storage provider might charge $0.10 for 100 GB and $0.5 for 1 TB storage usage.
  • - Graduated pricing
  • - Overage fees
  • - Custom commitments and discounts

For more information on how all of these pricing models work, check out [this blog](https://openmeter.io/blog/ai-pricing-journey)this blog.[](http://openmeter.io)

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:

• - **CFOs and finance leaders**: govern costs by keeping visibility into AI resource consumption all the way down to the request level–across APIs, LLMs, and (in the future) MCP and event data.
• - **CROs and revenue leaders**: monetize AI-powered products and APIs faster. Launch usage-based offerings without building billing infrastructure from scratch.
• - **CDOs and AI leaders**: turn your AI platform into a governed, measurable business capability—not an R&D black hole. Understand the true cost of every AI capability you deliver–and find areas where you can offer real top-line growth benefit to the org.
• - **API product managers**: build and price AI-powered products with the same rigor you'd apply to any SaaS offering—and bring your existing API monetization into the same system.
• - **API and platform teams**: want some of that coveted AI budget for your own initiatives? Prove that you can drive serious cost governance and revenue benefits by optimizing API program costs and finding areas where existing APIs can be monetized.