Where Kong AI Gateway fits
Kong AI Gateway is the natural choice for organisations that already run Kong for API management and want to bring LLM traffic under the same governance. Its strengths are semantic caching, prompt guards, rate limiting and analytics delivered as plugins, self-hosted control for compliance, and one policy plane across every API — not just AI. If your platform team already owns Kong, adding AI routing there keeps auth, quotas and observability consistent with the rest of your estate.
Where Kunavo wins
Kunavo removes the provider accounts and the operations. There is nothing to deploy: top up one wallet and call Claude, Gemini, GPT, plus image, video and audio, at 30–70% under each provider's list price depending on the model — no Anthropic Console, no Google Cloud project, no gateway to host, patch and monitor, one invoice. Generation endpoints are first-class, the native Anthropic Messages API is on the same key, and checkout is Stripe-native with local methods. Kong gives a platform team a gateway to run and govern; Kunavo gives a product team a gateway to call.
How to pick (or use both)
Pick Kong AI Gateway if you run enterprise API management, need self-hosted governance over provider keys you already hold, and want AI under the same policy plane as the rest of your APIs. Pick Kunavo if you want zero-ops hosted inference on one prepaid wallet at 30–70% under list, first-class multimodal, and one invoice. They compose: point Kong AI Gateway at Kunavo (base URL https://api.kunavo.com/v1) to keep Kong's governance and semantic caching while inference runs through Kunavo's discounted catalog.
How you pay: Kong AI Gateway vs Kunavo
Kong is infrastructure you deploy, so nobody pays Kong for tokens. Kunavo's checkout is Stripe-native, so the list follows the buyer rather than our billing country: cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, JCB, UnionPay) and Apple Pay everywhere Stripe reaches, Link and Cash App Pay for one-tap repeat top-ups, Klarna and Amazon Pay, ACH bank transfer for US accounts, and Alipay and WeChat Pay for mainland China. Local rails appear by country — Pix in Brazil, Bancontact in Belgium, BLIK in Poland, EPS in Austria, MB WAY in Portugal — with Stripe converting the dollar amount into local currency on the checkout page, so a Brazilian buyer scans a Pix QR code for an amount in reais instead of hunting for a card cleared for international purchases. The AI Gateway plugin routes to provider accounts you already hold, so the model spend stays on those accounts and those cards; what you pay Kong for is the gateway itself, typically under an enterprise agreement rather than a self-serve checkout. That is the right shape for a platform team with procurement behind it, and the wrong shape for a developer who wants to be calling Claude ten minutes from now with nothing but a phone.