# Kong Konnect

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/api-gateway/kong-konnect/

Kong's managed control plane for its API gateway, billed per gateway per month rather than per request.

## Who it suits

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.

Consider something else if Availability is the reason you are buying a gateway. The $25 serverless tier carries no SLA at all; 99.99% starts at the $500-a-month dedicated gateway, plus $0.15 per GB of bandwidth on top.

## iScore

68 / 100 (80% interval 65–72), rank 2 of 4 in api-gateway — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every api-gateway peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/api-gateway/kong-konnect/alternatives/

- Price: 66 (59–72), weight 50%, 3 of 3 criteria scored
- Trust and compliance: 59 (52–65), weight 30%, 1 of 3 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: audit_logs, sso_saml
- Evidence: 90 (90–90), weight 20%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://konghq.com/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- Kind of free offer: Free trial ([source](https://konghq.com/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- What the free plan includes: Thirty days of the full enterprise feature set with no gateway limits and 30 days of analytics retention, then it stops. There is no standing free tier underneath it. ([source](https://konghq.com/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- Entry paid plan: $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. ([source](https://konghq.com/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: 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. ([source](https://konghq.com/pricing), read 2026-09-15)

### Infrastructure

- Uptime SLA: 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. ([source](https://konghq.com/pricing), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [Kong Konnect vs Amazon API Gateway](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-api-gateway-vs-kong-konnect/)
- [Kong Konnect vs Zuplo](https://inetgeek.com/compare/kong-konnect-vs-zuplo/)
- [Kong Konnect vs Apigee](https://inetgeek.com/compare/kong-konnect-vs-apigee/)