API gateways
Each provider is profiled from its own pricing page, with the source recorded against every figure. Three of these bill for traffic and one bills for the gateway itself, so the column that matters is not the price but what the price counts — and next to it, what each one actually commits to keeping up.
API gateways
| Provider | Entry paid plan | Published SLA | What is metered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon API Gateway | None. There are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments — you pay per request from the first one, at $1.00 per million for HTTP APIs and $3.50 per million for REST APIs in us-east-1. | 99.95% Monthly Uptime Percentage per region, backed by service credits. | Per request, and the rate depends on which of two API types you deploy: $1.00 per million HTTP API requests falling to $0.90 above 300 million, against $3.50 per million REST API requests falling to $1.51 above 20 billion. WebSocket APIs are billed separately at $1.00 per million messages plus $0.25 per million connection-minutes. Data transfer out is charged on top, except on Private APIs. |
| Apigee | $365 a month per region for a Base environment, plus $20 per million API calls on a Standard proxy. Pay-as-you-go means no contract, not no floor — calls are served by an environment and the cheapest environment carries that monthly charge whether traffic arrives or not. The most expensive entry in this category by an order of magnitude. | 99.99% for Pay-as-you-go, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus subscriptions; 99% for Apigee Standard. The pricing page states it differently again, capping a Base environment at "up to 99%" — so a pay-as-you-go customer holds a 99.99% commitment while deploying into environments the price table rates at 99%, and neither page reconciles the two. | Per million API calls, at a rate set by which of two proxy types serves them. A Standard proxy is $20 per million up to 50 million, $16 to 500 million and $13 above that; an Extensible proxy, which unlocks the full policy set, is $100, $80 and $64 across the same bands — five times the price for the same call volume. Choosing the proxy type is therefore a pricing decision as much as a capability one. |
| Kong Konnect | $25 a month per serverless control plane on the Plus tier, which allows up to five of them. Nothing is metered per request at that price — the charge is for running the gateway, not for the traffic through it. | 99.99% on dedicated cloud gateways. The serverless gateways that the $25 entry price buys carry NO SLA at all, which the plan table states in the same row — so the cheapest way into Kong is also the one with no availability commitment. | Per control plane per month, not per request. A serverless control plane is $25 a month and a dedicated cloud gateway is $500 a month plus $0.15 per GB of bandwidth, with volume discounts above that. The bill therefore tracks how many gateways you operate rather than how much traffic they carry — the opposite of every other member of this category. |
| Zuplo | $25 a month for Builder, which includes 100,000 requests and then charges $100 per additional 100,000. Enterprise starts at $1,000 a month on an annual contract. | 99.5% as the baseline, rising to as much as 99.999% on Enterprise. The lowest published floor in this category and the highest published ceiling, both on the same page. | Per request, in blocks: Builder includes 100,000 a month and bills $100 per 100,000 beyond it, which works out far above the per-million rates AWS and Apigee quote and is aimed at low volume rather than scale. The MCP gateway, AI gateway and developer portal are included on every plan rather than sold separately. |
Which to consider
APIs that already live in AWS, where the gateway can reach a Lambda or a private VPC service without leaving the account. Nothing is bought in advance: no minimum fee, no upfront commitment, and $1.00 per million HTTP API requests from the first one.
API programmes that need policy depth and are already on Google Cloud, with 60 days of sandbox evaluation before any commitment and volume rates that fall to $13 per million calls above 500 million.
Running several gateways whose traffic you cannot forecast. The bill is per control plane per month — $25 serverless, $500 dedicated — so a spike in requests costs nothing extra, which is the opposite of every per-call competitor here.
Getting an API behind a gateway without a procurement conversation: 100,000 requests a month free forever, no card, with the developer portal, AI gateway and MCP gateway included rather than sold as tiers.