Open-source AI infrastructure
Compare Everstack and Kong AI Gateway on licence terms, which AI plugins need an enterprise key, per-model pricing, deployment modes and runtime scope, with facts f…
Kong Gateway itself is Apache-2.0. Its AI capabilities arrive as plugins, and the split matters: ai-proxy, ai-prompt-guard, ai-request-transformer, ai-response-transformer, ai-prompt-template and ai-prompt-decorator are free. Semantic caching, advanced rate limiting, PII sanitisation, MCP proxying, LLM-as-judge and every guardrail plugin carry an AI License Required badge on their own documentation pages.
Konnect Plus includes five unique LLMs proxied by AI plugins, measured hourly and enforced monthly, then charges $100 per month for each additional model. Requests are metered separately: 1M included, then $200 per additional 1M up to a 10M cap, with control planes priced on top. Figures observed August 2026. Everstack does not bill on model count.
Kong describes itself in governance terms: securing agent-to-agent communication, governing MCP server access, inspecting and blocking messages in flight. Agent execution and code sandboxing happen elsewhere. That is a scope difference rather than a shortcoming, and it decides whether you are buying one system or two.
If you already run Kong for your APIs, adding AI traffic to a gateway your team already operates beats standing up a second system, and that argument usually wins on its own. Kong also has 44,059 GitHub stars, years of production proxy hardening, and a general-purpose API gateway that Everstack does not try to be.