Enterprises are moving toward usage-based and results-driven pricing as artificial intelligence becomes central to products and services. Real-time metering and flexible billing are enabling companies to track consumption instantly, manage costs more effectively and capture greater value from how their technologies are used.

Monetization of application programming interfaces has existed for about a decade, but many organizations initially avoided direct monetization, according to Ross Kukulinski (pictured, left), vice president of product management at Kong Inc. Instead, they focused on managing access: determining which customers or partners could use specific APIs.

“[Because of] this rise of AI and the need to get the value out of the investment you’re making there, we realized that we really, really needed a deep metering and monetization,” Kukulinski said. “Billing – AI billing and AI revenue – is ultimately a metering problem.”

Kukulinski and Peter Marton (pictured, right), co-founder of OpenMeter, spoke with theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty at the Kong API Summit: The API Summit for the Agentic Era, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the growing shift toward AI-driven API monetization and the rising importance of real-time metering and flexible, usage-based billing. (* Disclosure below.)

Real-time metering solution

In September, Kong announced it had acquired OpenMeter, the developer of an open-source platform for usage-based metering and billing. The team at Kong had identified OpenMeter as the only open-source solution that met all their needs, according to Kukulinski.

“We wanted to bring all of the capabilities of OpenMeter and build those into Kong Konnect, our cloud platform, then obviously bring the team with it,” he said. “We wanted that expertise.”

AI infrastructure is significantly more expensive than traditional software-as-a-service operations. As a result, both vendors and customers are seeking tighter control over usage and costs, Marton explained.

“The vendors want to have real-time metering because they want to have governance in place, they want to be able to control or even stop the traffic of certain features, but on the other end, the customers for the same reason want to see the consumption in real-time,” Marton said. “They want to be able to take an action in their agent, in [their large language learning model], and they want to see that immediately reflected in both their usage and the estimated cost. That’s only possible on both sides with real-time metering.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Kong API Summit event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Kong API Summit. Neither Kong, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE