Kong debuts tools for metering and monetizing APIs and AI agents – News

The API technology Kong Inc. announced a flurry of innovations this week at its annual developer conference, headlined by a new offering that enables companies to make money from their application programming interfaces, data streams and artificial intelligence models.

The new offering is called Kong Konnect Metering and Billing, and it’s powered by technology from OpenMeter that was acquired by Kong just over a month ago. It’s meant to help businesses create new revenue streams by turning digital assets into a steady source of income.

Also at Kong API Summit this week, the company unveiled the latest update to the Konnect Service Catalog, which is now deeply integrated with the Amazon Web Services API Gateway. It enables enterprises to discover, visualize and govern APIs in the AWS cloud alongside those already managed by Kong.

Kong is a provider of API and microservices management tools, connecting these two vital components of modern applications and AI systems across public clouds, Kubernetes environments and on-premises data centers. APIs are what enable applications to communicate easily with other apps and web services. For example, when booking a flight using a service such as Skyscanner, it’s an API that allows that same reservation to appear immediately in the user’s Google Calendar.

Kong’s technologies help simplify API management across multiple computing environments with one-click deployment mechanisms. With the Kong Konnect platform, the company has established itself as a clear leader in API management, as the de facto choice for thousands of developers globally.

Easy API monetization

Kong said the growing adoption of AI systems means there’s an urgent need for enterprises to be able to scale, monetize and manage usage across their digital services. In addition, companies also need tools to help them adapt their prices and services more rapidly as the AI ecosystem evolves.

However, most organizations have been unable to do this because they’re stuck with fragmented visibility and billing processes, which are an obstacle to efficient revenue capture and cost controls. Kong Konnect Metering and Billing, the latest addition to Kong Konnect, is designed to address these challenges when it becomes available to customers before the end of the year. It’s a unified billing and metering tool for AI and APIs, providing a single view of usage for all of these services.

Konnect Metering and Billing allows companies to monitor and meter real-time use of every API and AI application that’s managed by Kong’s API and AI Gateways. With it, they can create usage-based pricing systems that can be rolled out easily and market-tested on small audience segments, with tools for optimizing their costs based on real-time feedback.

The tool also supports the integration of add-ons, entitlements and granular limits on users, so businesses can control access to different products and features. And there are tools for generating quick invoices for each customer at the end of each billing cycle, with support for multiple payment gateways. It also provides detailed analytics to generate insights into application and service usage, revenue, churn rates and more, which can be used to identify future revenue opportunities, the company said.

Paul Nashawaty, an analyst with News Media’s sister organization theCUBE Research, said Konnect Metering and Billing has big implications for companies that are trying to monetize new AI agents, which are services that can automate enterprise work without human supervision. “Kong is positioning itself to be the infrastructure backbone of the agent economy,” he pointed out.

He explained that the tool leverages OpenMeter’s open-source technology to treat APIs, AI models and event streams as products that can be measured, priced and iterated. For the first time, financial controls now sit alongside the technical ones, and this means that businesses will be able to identify their best performing products and the ones that don’t perform, and monetize those that deliver the most value to customers.

“The business implications are clear,” Nashawaty said. “It turns APIs and AI services into direct revenue engines for the agent economy. That’s really where this is going and where the money is going to be driven here.”

AWS API Gateway integration

Kong is all about trying to simplify API management, and not only in terms of monetization. With the update to the Kong Konnect Service Catalog, it’s also trying to help developers become more organized and efficient.

Konnect Service Catalog helps organizations manage and govern their APIs and services through a single pane of glass. It provides visibility into all API services running within an organization, allowing users to discover, document and enforce compliance across their API infrastructure.

The update is available now and means Konnect Service Catalog now extends to AWS environments, helping developers to overcome API sprawl and fragmentation, which is a common problem for larger enterprises that may have thousands of different services up and running. By providing centralized visibility into all of these services, Kong says it’s helping to eliminate blind spots, acting as a single source of truth for both humans and AI agents.

The service now supports the automatic discovery and ingestion of REST APIs from the AWS API Gateway into the Konnect Catalog, acting as a full API inventory. It also enables consistent policies to be applied to APIs, regardless of their origin, and enhances governance through the use of Service Catalog Scorecards.

Tools for AI agents

In what was an incredibly busy day for Kong, it also found time to announce the expansion of Model Context Protocol support across its entire platform, which makes it possible for AI agents to discover APIs that deliver endpoints as “tools” or other functionality, so they can use third-party software and systems more efficiently.

AI developers will probably be interested in the Volcano SDK, too. It’s a new TypeScript SDK announced by the company that combines large language models reasoning with real-world actions via MCP tools, and it’s said to dramatically simplify the creation of AI agents.

Previously, developers would need to write hundreds of lines of code for AI agents to be able to handle various tool schemas, provider switching and context management, but the Volcano SDK automates much of this work. The result? Developers can now create AI agents with as little as nine lines of code, rather than hundreds.

Finally, Kong announced the winners of its latest Kong Innovator Awards, which recognizes startups and other innovative companies that have used Kong’s tools to create innovative new systems. Kong named BMW Group as its 2025 “innovator of the year,” after it used Kong’s platform to rip out its old, monolithic on-premises API gateway that’s not designed to scale, and replace it with a streamlined, cloud-based hub. Thanks to Kong, BMW was able to reduce the latency of connections from clients to its ConnectedDrive system from 250 milliseconds to less than 30 milliseconds, enhancing communications and boosting their reliability.

The U.S. ticketing platform SeatGeek Inc. was named as the top Kong innovator in the Americas after using the Kong Konnect platform to centralize LLM request validations at the gateway layer, eliminating the risk of spoofed traffic and reducing engineering times for its AI chatbots and services. Other winners included Siemens AG, Seaco Sri, United Airlines Inc. and Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs department in the U.K.

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