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API Monetization

The latest news and announcements about Kong, our products, and our ecosystem, as well as voices from across our community.

AI Input vs. Output: Why Token Direction Matters for AI Cost Management

API GatewayMarch 10, 2026

The Shifting Economic Landscape: The AI token economy in 2026 is evolving, and enterprise leaders must distinguish between low-cost input tokens and high-premium output tokens to maintain profitability. Agentic AI Financial Risks: The transition to agentic AI and multi-step reasoning models creates…

Dan Temkin

Beyond the Single Payment Provider Lock-in: How Kong Enables Multi-Rail Billing for the AI Era

API MonetizationMarch 6, 2026

Many companies start with a single payment provider like Stripe because it’s fast and reliable for self-service subscriptions. However, as OpenAI discovered, as your business needs to support a range of freemium accounts, self-service pro plans, and complex enterprise contracts, a…

Dan Temkin

Metered Billing for APIs: Architecture, Telemetry, and Real-World Patterns

API MonetizationMarch 5, 2026

Imagine 47 million requests hitting your platform last month. Can you prove who made each one—and invoice with confidence? If that question tightens your stomach, you're not alone. Metered billing for APIs promises fair, transparent pricing that scales with customer success. But it only works when…

Kong

The Platform Enterprises Need to Compete? Kong Already Built It

AI ConnectivityFebruary 25, 2026

We have crossed a threshold in the AI economy where the competitive advantage is no longer about access to data — it’s about access to context. The "context economy" has arrived, defined by a fundamental shift from selling data products to selling context products as a service. This is the shift…

Alex Drag

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Agentic AI Cost Management: Stopping Margin Erosion and the Fragmentation Tax

Agentic AIJanuary 30, 2026

AI spending is exploding across the organization—but often not in the ways leadership approved or finance can track. Development teams spin up LLM connections to ship features faster. Data teams provision GPU clusters for experiments that get abandoned. Multiple teams solve the same problem three…

Alex Drag

From Strategy to Action: See Konnect Metering & Billing in Motion

Kong KonnectJanuary 22, 2026

We've talked about why 2026 is the year of AI unit economics . There, we explored the "2025 hangover" where organizations realized that without financial governance, AI isn't just a science project but has become a margin-bleeding cost center. But "governance" and "monetization" shouldn't just be…

Dan Temkin

New Year, New Unit Economics: Konnect Metering & Billing Is Here

API MonetizationJanuary 6, 2026

Every January, the same resolutions show up: eat better, exercise more, finally learn that language, finally figure out that production use case for AI agents (OK, this one isn’t so typical unless you operate in our universe). But if you're responsible for your organization's AI strategy, we'd like…

Alex Drag

Liabilities into Assets: Konnect Metering & Billing, Powered by OpenMeter

API MonetizationOctober 14, 2025

Picture this: you’ve spent months building a slick API that developers love, and it’s already humming behind the scenes in production. But every time someone calls your endpoint, what happens? You get an invisible hit across multiple cost centers, including expensive LLMs, without a clear line of…

Dan Temkin

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

API MonetizationSeptember 3, 2025

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…

Augusto Marietti

How to Create a Platform Cross-Charging Model (and Why Not To Do It)

API AnalyticsMay 2, 2025

I'm commonly asked by customers for advice on how they can build a good platform cross-charging model for their organization. And my gut reaction is nearly always "don't." We'll come back to why I think that later, but first let's look at what cross-charging means, why you might want it, and how it…

Steve Roberts

How to Implement API Product Tiering with Kong Konnect

Kong KonnectOctober 22, 2024

In this blog post, we'll talk about how to implement API product tiering, a powerful way to customize access, control usage, and monetize APIs. This model can help you scale efficiently while maintaining a smooth user experience. Read on to learn more! We'll be talking about how to implement API…

Declan Keane

What is API Monetization? Exploring API Revenue Streams

API MonetizationAugust 23, 2024

APIs enable our digital world. But they can also be a powerful source of revenue through the process of API monetization or API productization. A decade ago, many business workflows were conducted through manual tasks, logging into monolithic SaaS applications that were rolled out across entire…

Kong

The Economic Impact of APIs: API Monetization, AI, Web3, and Beyond

API MonetizationOctober 25, 2023

Whether ordering groceries online, checking your bank balance, or tracking a delivery, APIs are behind the scenes making it all possible. They're the backbone of the digital experiences that drive our interconnected global economy. You may know that. But beyond the convenient (and sometimes…

Eric Pulsifer

Creating an API Monetization Stack

API ManagementJune 20, 2023

API monetization is currently a trending topic for many organizations looking to beef up their revenue. Of course, monetizing APIs isn't the easiest of tasks and requires quite a few moving parts. When it comes to monetization, you're going to need an entire technology stack to handle the heavy…

Matthew Tanner

What is API Economy?

API Economy Blog
API ManagementJuly 6, 2022

Today's digital economy is shifting toward dependence on microservices — self-contained and reusable software components — working in coordination to compose the applications we use. Communication between microservices happens through the API (or application programming interface) . Using APIs…

Brad Drysdale

6 Best Practices for Productizing APIs

API MonetizationJuly 6, 2022

Web APIs are an integral piece of the development landscape today. According to a 2021 survey , top industries such as Digital Banking , Retail, and Financial services have experienced significant year-on-year API traffic growth with 70%, 51% and 50% increases since February 2021, respectively. The…

Ahmed Koshok
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