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POSTPOST /pricing-models/self-hosted-vs-saas

Self-hosted vs SaaS API gateway TCO

Free at the binary level rarely means free at the operating-cost level. The break-even depends on what you already pay your platform team.

What 'free' costs

The list price of Kong OSS is zero. The actual cost is the EKS line, the observability stack (Grafana Cloud or self-host), the engineer FTE fraction, and the on-call burden. At a 0.5 FTE allocation, the loaded cost is over $7,000 per month before infra. See /calculator/self-hosted-tco.

When SaaS is the right answer

Small platform team, regulated industry, or buyer who values SLA over per-second flexibility. The SaaS markup is paid for by the FTE you do not hire.

Primary sources
$ref related routes

Verified 20 June 2026 Oliver Wakefield-Smith, Founder, Digital Signet we mark quote when a vendor does not publish, and stop.