Updated October 25, 2026
· ~2 min read
Amazon API Gateway charges per request (HTTP APIs from $1.00 per million, REST APIs from $3.50 per million) and handles authorisation, throttling, TLS and scaling with nothing to run. Kong Gateway and Envoy Gateway are the open-source gateways most teams run on Kubernetes instead: Kong with a large plugin ecosystem, Envoy Gateway as the Envoy project's implementation of the Kubernetes Gateway API.
For many AWS workloads the honest third option is no gateway at all: an Application Load Balancer in front of ECS or EKS does routing and TLS, with authentication in the application or in ALB's built-in OIDC support.
At 100 million requests a month, HTTP APIs cost about $100 and REST APIs about $350; at a billion, roughly $930 and $3,000 or more after volume tiers. A pair of gateway pods on a cluster you already run costs a small slice of a node at either volume — so at high, steady volume self-hosting wins on price, as long as the gateway's availability and upgrades are someone's job.
Question 1 of 2
Is the backend Lambda, or is volume under a few hundred million requests a month?
Use API Gateway HTTP APIs in front of Lambda and for public APIs at low to moderate volume — they are cheap, managed and integrate with IAM, Cognito and JWT authorisers. Use REST APIs only for features HTTP APIs lack, such as usage plans with API keys or request validation. Use an ALB when you only need routing and TLS to containers. Run Kong or Envoy Gateway on Kubernetes when request volume makes per-request pricing expensive, when you need plugins or traffic policies API Gateway does not offer, or when the gateway must run the same way outside AWS.
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As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.