During its API Summit today, Kong announced several new features to help improve the way developers manage their APIs.
It announced that Kong Event Gateway will be added to Kong Konnect later this quarter. Kong Event Gateway was first introduced earlier this year, and it provides a unified workspace for building, governing, securing, exposing, and publishing Kafka data like it was an API.
Product teams can expose Kafka as HTTP APIs or as native Kafka services that communicate over the Kafka protocol.
According to the company, the platform helps reduce the infrastructure burdens associated with running Kafka.
It also enables self-service access for agents and LLMs, allows teams to move event-driven architecture workloads to the cloud by offering a centralized method for handling encrypted data across clients, and provides role-based access control and authorization.
“With Event Gateway, enterprises can start to drive more ROI out of their event data through data productization and monetization,” said Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder of Kong. “Customers can continue to de-fragment their data ecosystem by unifying their approach to API, AI, and, now, event data.”
The company also announced its new Metering & Billing capability, which is powered by OpenMeter and provides real-time usage metering for API traffic. It enables developers to monetize their APIs while also optimizing growth, reducing churn, and capitalizing on opportunities.
It can be used to market test, modify, and create different versions of products and rate cards that adapt to market demands.
Metering & Billing also allows developers to create entitlements, add-ons, and limits so that they have greater control over costs and can manage customers’ access to features in real-time.
Developers will be able to generate invoices on demand or at the end of each billing cycle, and will have access to comprehensive dashboards and analytics to get insights into revenue, churn rate, and future revenue opportunities.
Kong’s Metering & Billing will be available in Kong Konnect in Q4 of 2025. It was made possible via the company’s recent acquisition of OpenMeter, an open-source platform for usage-based billing.
“By integrating OpenMeter into Kong Konnect, we’re giving organizations the tools to transform their digital services into profitable assets while maintaining strong governance in the agentic AI era. This unified approach not only accelerates monetization but also provides deep insights to optimize strategies, help reduce churn, and capitalize on emerging opportunities,” said Ross Kukulinski, vice president of product at Kong.
Finally, the company announced that Konnect Service Catalog now integrates with AWS API Gateway, allowing customers to discover, visualize, and govern APIs that are deployed in AWS, and be able to manage them alongside their other APIs that are managed in Kong’s platform.
This new integration was designed to help address the problem of API sprawl and provide customers with more visibility into their API estate.
“The updated Konnect Service Catalog brings the APIs running in AWS into the same view as the rest of your services. It unlocks a new model of access and gives platform teams the governance tools they need to manage API sprawl with confidence,” said Reza Shafii, senior vice president of product at Kong.
