Meter, bill, and monetize APIs as products ready for human *and* non-human customers.

Let’s be honest: the promise of API monetization has mostly been unfulfilled.

The Agentic Era is changing this. As agent development kicks off, agent developers will realize that their success is wholly dependent on high-quality, easily accessible APIs and event data, and the MCP layer that exposes those APIs and event streams.

The organizations that figure out how to monetize access to and agentic consumption of those APIs and event data resources will be the organizations that figure out how to create new revenue streams before their competitors.

### Meter, bill, monetize

Build API and event data product entitlements, meter usage in real-time, and bill customers based on consumption.

### Launch monetized products faster

Eliminate the need to build and maintain custom monetization functionality, and ship monetized functionality faster.

### Govern costs & control consumption

Monetization isn’t just about direct revenue generation. It's also about governing the internal resource usage that drives AI systems. Do both in Konnect.

Monetized products need a digital catalog for customer visibility. Build your catalog with the Konnect Developer Portal so that APIs become self-serve, easily discoverable, monetized API products – complete with API documentation and self-serve registration.

Design product tiers and subscription mechanisms that define API resource entitlements as subscription tiers. Enforce those entitlements via rate limiting in Kong runtime infrastructure.

Monitor and meter against API resource consumption in real-time. Integrate with payment gateways and ERPs to bill and collect revenue.

REST APIs aren’t the only data sources that Agents and AI applications will leverage – event data will be crucial. Monetize access to the data that agents will rely upon for real-time decision making.

Agents and AI systems are expensive, and most organizations still [struggle to control costs](https://konghq.com/blog/enterprise/hidden-ai-connectivity-tax)struggle to control costs. Take the metering, billing, and entitlement enforcements you use for direct monetization, and reuse them for internal cost governance and internal cost-sharing mechanisms.