Get started with Metering & Billing in Konnect

Before you configure Metering & Billing, you can set up a Consumer, Kong Air. Consumers let you identify the client that’s interacting with Kong Gateway. Later in this guide, you’ll be mapping this Consumer to a customer in Metering & Billing and assigning them to a Premium plan. Doing this allows you map existing Consumers that are already consuming your APIs to customers to make them billable.

You’re going to use key authentication in this tutorial, so the Consumer needs an API key to access any Kong Gateway Services.

echo '
_format_version: "3.0"
consumers:
  - username: kong-air
    keyauth_credentials:
    - key: air-key
' | deck gateway apply -

Authentication lets you identify a Consumer so you can invoice them as customers after they’ve consumed the resource, in this case, the API request. This example uses the Key Authentication plugin, but you can use any authentication plugin that you prefer.

Enable the plugin globally, which means it applies to all Kong Gateway Services and Routes:

echo '
_format_version: "3.0"
plugins:
  - name: key-auth
    config:
      key_names:
      - apikey
' | deck gateway apply -

In Metering & Billing, meters track and record the consumption of a resource or service over time. This usage can take various forms, such as API requests, compute time seconds, or tokens consumed. Usage metering is commonly event-based to ensure accuracy and data you can audit.

In this guide, you’ll enable API Gateway requests for metering. This will meter API request traffic in Metering & Billing so that you can charge customers for API traffic usage.

1. In the Konnect sidebar, click Metering & Billing.
2. In the API Gateway Requests settings, click Enable Gateways.
3. Select the “quickstart” control plane.
4. Click Enable 1 Gateways.

Meters collect raw usage data, but features make that data billable. Without a feature, usage is tracked but not invoiced. Now that you’re metering API consumption, you need to associate traffic from the example-service Gateway Service with a feature as something you want to price or govern.

Features are customer-facing, and show up on the invoice for paid plans. Feature examples could include things like flight data requests, GPT-5 input tokens, or available LLM models.

In this guide, you’ll create a feature for the example-service you created in the prerequisites.

1. In the Konnect sidebar, click Metering & Billing.
2. In the Metering & Billing sidebar, click Product Catalog.
3. Click Create Feature.
4. In the Name field, enter example-service.
5. From the Meter dropdown menu, select “API Gateway Requests”.
6. Click Add group by filter. The group by filter ensures you only bill for traffic to example-service, not all Kong Gateway traffic. This lets you offer different pricing for different APIs.
7. From the Group by dropdown menu, select “service_name”.
8. From the Operator dropdown menu, select “Equals”.
9. From the Value dropdown menu, select “example-service”.
10. Click Save.

Plans are the core building blocks of your product catalog. They are a collection of rate cards that define the price and access of a feature. Plans can be assigned to customers by starting a subscription.

A rate card describes price and usage limits or access control for a feature or item. Rate cards are made up of the associated feature, price, and optional usage limits or access control for the feature, called entitlements.

In this section, you’ll create a Premium plan that grants paying customers access to the example-service at a rate of 5,000 requests per month:

1. In the Konnect sidebar, click Metering & Billing.
2. In the Metering & Billing sidebar, click Product Catalog.
3. Click the Plans tab.
4. Click Create Plan.
5. In the Name field, enter Premium.
6. In the Billing cadence dropdown menu, select “1 month”.
7. Click Save.
8. Click Add Rate Card.
9. From the Feature dropdown menu, select “example-service”.
10. Click Next Step.
11. From the Pricing model dropdown menu, select “Usage based”.
12. In the Price per unit field, enter 1.
13. Click Next Step.
14. Click Save Rate Card.
15. Click Publish Plan.

Customers are the entities who pay for the consumption. In many cases, it’s equal to your Consumer. Here you are going to create a customer and map our Consumer to it.

1. In the Konnect sidebar, click Metering & Billing.
2. In the Metering & Billing sidebar, click Billing.
3. Click Create Customer.
4. In the Name field, enter Kong Air.
5. In the Include usage from dropdown, select “kong-air”.
6. Click Save.
7. Click the Subscriptions tab.
8. Click Create a Subscription.
9. From the Subscribed Plan dropdown, select “Premium”.
10. Click Next Step.
11. Click Create Subscription.

You can run the following command to test the that the Kong Air Consumer is invoiced correctly:

for _ in {1..6}; do
  curl  -i $KONNECT_PROXY_URL/anything \
       -H "apikey:air-key" 
  echo
done

This will generate six requests. Now, check the invoice that was created in Metering & Billing:

1. In the Konnect sidebar, click Metering & Billing.
2. In the Metering & Billing sidebar, click Billing.
3. Click the Invoices tab.
4. Click Kong Air.
5. Click the Invoicing tab.
6. Click Preview Invoice.

You’ll see in Lines that example-service is listed and was used six times. In this guide, you’re using the sandbox for invoices. To deploy your subscription in production, configure a payments integration in Metering & Billing > Settings.