Kong · Rate Limits

Kong Rate Limits

Kong's pricing constrains Konnect through plan-level quotas (Plus = 1M API requests/month included, $200/M overage; AI Gateway = 5 LLM models included, $100/extra). The Konnect control-plane API itself does not publicly publish per-second / per-minute throttling thresholds in its developer documentation; consumers should code against the standard 429 / Retry-After contract. Kong's flagship product is itself a rate-limiting plugin set, applied to data-plane traffic the customer terminates.

Kong Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Kong on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 10 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_month, llm_models, gateways, portals, and apis.

The profile also includes 3 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled and serviceUnavailable.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, API Gateway, and API Management.

10 Limits Throttle: 429
Rate LimitingAPI GatewayAPI Management

Limits

Konnect Plus included API requests organization
requests_per_month · month
1000000
Overage billed at $200 per additional 1M requests on the Plus plan; total capped at 10M requests/month on Plus (move to Enterprise for higher volume).
Konnect Plus maximum API requests organization
requests_per_month · month
10000000
Hard plan ceiling on Plus; above this requires Enterprise.
Konnect Plus AI Gateway models organization
llm_models
5
Each additional unique LLM model billed at $100/month on the Plus plan.
Konnect Plus Serverless gateways organization
gateways
5
Konnect Plus Hybrid gateways organization
gateways
2
Konnect Plus Dedicated Cloud gateways organization
gateways
2
Konnect Plus Developer Portals organization
portals
2
Konnect Plus Published APIs per Portal portal
apis
20
First 10 published APIs billed at $20/month each, next 10 at $10/month each.
Konnect Plus Service Catalog services organization
services
2
Additional services require Enterprise.
Konnect control-plane API throttling organization
varies
see Kong Konnect API documentation; numeric thresholds not publicly published

Policies

Plan quota vs gateway throttling
Plus-plan request and model caps are billing thresholds, not hard throttles — exceeding them creates overage charges, not 429 responses to your end users.
Backoff
For 429/5xx from the Konnect control-plane API, retry with exponential backoff and jitter; honor Retry-After.
Data-plane rate limiting
Customers configure their own Kong rate-limiting/rate-limiting-advanced plugins on data-plane gateways to throttle their consumers; that configuration is independent of the Konnect platform's own control-plane behavior.

Sources