In a move that signals the increasing productization of APIs and their place in the DevOps toolchain, which must now extend beyond technical orchestration to encompass the entire lifecycle of digital revenue management, API management platform Kong announced its acquisition of OpenMeter, an open-source billing and usage metering solution.
While the financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, the rationale was clear: the proliferation of agentic AI and large language models (LLMs) has led to a major shift in API traffic patterns.
Agentic systems—which autonomously handle end-to-end workflows without human intervention—can trigger thousands of API calls per second, creating a scale and variability of usage that demands a different approach to monetization. Kong’s acquisition of OpenMeter seeks to accommodate this new class of real-time digital consumption by offering a turnkey solution for metering and monetizing API calls in agentic and generative AI systems. The integration plan itself involves embedding OpenMeter’s core product natively into Kong Konnect, a unified platform for API management.
The acquisition is a direct response to a growing market need to shift away from the simple, flat-rate subscription models that most digital services—including AI solution vendors—rely on today to a more sophisticated consumption-based alternative. It also bridges the gap between two previously distinct technological domains: API traffic management, which is the function of the gateway, and revenue management, which is traditionally the function of a billing system. The result is a platform combining policy enforcement, security, and monetization in a unified solution.
For software companies, the clear benefit is the ability to manage the entire lifecycle of digital revenue across a single platform. The API gateway still provides the core technical functions, including routing, authentication, rate-limiting, and security enforcement but, with this consolidated solution, the API gateway also becomes a point of sale. This promises to help companies address the issues inherent to demanding workloads like agentic and generative AI, where latency, complexity, and the potential for revenue leakage are persistent problems. Many AI companies have been operating at a loss for this very reason.
Furthermore, the fact that Kong is committed to maintaining OpenMeter as an open-source project shows great promise for standardizing this approach in the near future by making it accessible to the very startups and individual developers who are building the next wave of AI applications. Thus, Kong isn’t just buying a feature, but also an active development community and a dominant market position in the future of API monetization.