API Gateway Cost Calculator
Compare All Major Providers
API gateway costs vary by 10x across providers. Compare AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, Google Apigee, Kong, Cloudflare and Traefik Hub. Enter your monthly request volume to see your exact bill before you commit.
API Gateway Pricing Comparison 2026
Per-million-request pricing, free tier allowances, and key add-on costs across all major providers.
| Provider | Free Tier | First Tier ($/1M req) | Data Transfer ($/GB) | WebSocket ($/1M msg) | Caching ($/GB) | WAF ($/1M req) | SLA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
AWS API Gateway REST & HTTP APIs on AWS infrastructure | 1M requests/month for 12 months | $3.50 | $0.090 | $1.00 | $0.028 | $0.60 | 99.95% |
Azure API Management Full lifecycle API management on Azure | Developer tier free (limited SLA) | $3.50 | $0.087 | $1.20 | $0.025 | $0.50 | 99.95% |
Google Apigee Enterprise API management by Google Cloud | Apigee X Eval (limited features) | $3.00 | $0.080 | N/A | $0.020 | $0.40 | 99.99% |
Kong Konnect Open-source core with managed control plane | Free tier: 1M requests/month | $0.90 | $0.070 | $0.80 | $0.015 | $0.30 | 99.9% |
Cloudflare API Gateway Edge-native API gateway built into CDN | Included in Workers Free (100k req/day) | $0.30 | Free | $0.15 | Free | $0.50 | 99.99% |
Traefik Hub Cloud-native API gateway for Kubernetes | Free tier: up to 3 services | $0.50 | $0.060 | $0.50 | $0.010 | $0.25 | 99.9% |
Prices in USD. Data transfer costs apply to outbound traffic. Some providers offer volume discounts not shown here. Verify current pricing at each provider's official pricing page.
API Gateway Cost Calculator
Enter your monthly usage to see estimated costs across all providers.
10.0M requests
95.4 GB data transfer
Response cache for frequently called endpoints
Potential savings: $38.12/month by choosing Cloudflare API Gateway over AWS API Gateway at your current usage.
Estimates include request charges, data transfer, and caching. WebSocket, WAF, custom domain, and support costs are excluded. Verify with official pricing pages.
The hidden cost of request pricing
The per-million-request headline price is just the starting point. Data transfer charges can double your bill on APIs with large response payloads. At 100M requests per month with 20 KB average responses, data transfer alone costs $190 on AWS.
Free tiers are bigger than they look
Cloudflare offers 3 million free requests per month permanently. AWS gives 1 million free per month for the first 12 months. Kong Konnect provides 1 million free requests indefinitely. For side projects and small APIs, these free tiers cover most workloads entirely.
Enterprise pricing is negotiable
All six providers offer custom enterprise pricing for large volumes. Discounts of 40% to 70% off list price are common for committed annual contracts. If you are spending over $5,000 per month, contact the vendor directly before committing to pay-as-you-go rates.
API Gateway Cost FAQ
How is API gateway cost calculated?
API gateway cost typically has three components: a per-request charge (usually priced per million API calls), a data transfer charge for outbound traffic in gigabytes, and optional add-on costs for features like response caching, WAF rules, WebSocket connections, and custom domain names. Most providers offer a free tier of one to three million requests per month. Beyond the free tier, request pricing ranges from $0.08 to $3.50 per million depending on the provider and volume tier.
Which API gateway is cheapest at high volume?
At high request volumes (100M+ requests per month), Cloudflare API Gateway is typically the most cost-effective at $0.15 per million requests with no data transfer charges. Traefik Hub and Kong Konnect also become competitive at scale. AWS API Gateway and Azure API Management are more expensive per million requests but may be justified if you are already using their cloud platforms and want tight integration.
Does AWS API Gateway charge for data transfer?
Yes. AWS API Gateway charges $0.09 per GB for outbound data transfer to the internet. For a typical API returning 10 KB payloads at 100 million requests per month, this adds roughly $95 in data transfer fees on top of the request charges. Data transfer between API Gateway and other AWS services in the same region is free.
What is the difference between AWS API Gateway REST API and HTTP API pricing?
AWS offers two API Gateway types with different pricing. HTTP APIs are approximately 70% cheaper than REST APIs at $1.00 per million requests versus $3.50 per million requests. HTTP APIs support most common use cases including Lambda proxies, JWT authorizers, and CORS. REST APIs support additional features including request/response transformation, API keys with usage plans, and per-stage caching. For most new workloads, the HTTP API tier is the better choice on cost.
How much does API gateway caching cost?
Caching costs vary significantly by provider. AWS API Gateway charges $0.028 per GB per hour for dedicated cache capacity, meaning a 1 GB cache costs about $20 per month. Azure API Management caches are included in the tier price. Cloudflare's CDN-based caching is free at the network edge. Google Apigee charges $0.02 per GB per hour. Caching can dramatically reduce your request costs for cacheable endpoints, often paying for itself if your API has repeated identical requests.
Should I self-host an API gateway to save costs?
Self-hosting open-source gateways like Kong (OSS), Traefik, or NGINX can eliminate per-request charges at very high volumes. However, self-hosting adds infrastructure costs (compute, load balancers, storage), engineering time for maintenance and upgrades, and operational overhead for high availability. As a rough rule: if you are spending over $2,000 per month on managed API gateway fees, it is worth evaluating self-hosted alternatives. Below that threshold, the operational savings rarely justify the engineering cost.