Amazon API Gateway
API management tools
AI API tools
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
Take the quiz to check if Amazon API Gateway and its alternatives fit your requirements.
Pay-as-you-go
Free Trial
Free version unavailable
Small
Medium
Large
- Information technology and software
- Media and communications
- Healthcare and life sciences
What is Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway is a managed service for creating, publishing, securing, and monitoring APIs that act as front doors to backend services. It is used by application and platform teams to expose REST, HTTP, and WebSocket endpoints for microservices, serverless functions, and legacy backends. The service integrates tightly with other AWS services for authentication, traffic management, logging, and observability. It is typically adopted in AWS-centric architectures where operational management of API infrastructure is delegated to the cloud provider.
Deep AWS service integration
API Gateway integrates natively with AWS Lambda, IAM, Amazon Cognito, CloudWatch, and AWS WAF, reducing the need for custom glue code. Teams can use IAM policies and AWS-native identity patterns to control access to APIs. Logging, metrics, and alarms flow into CloudWatch for centralized monitoring. This tight coupling is useful for organizations standardizing on AWS for runtime and security controls.
Multiple API protocol options
The product supports REST APIs, HTTP APIs, and WebSocket APIs, covering common request/response and real-time use cases. This allows teams to choose a model based on feature needs and cost/performance tradeoffs. It can front different backend types, including serverless functions and HTTP endpoints. The protocol breadth helps consolidate API exposure patterns under one managed gateway.
Built-in traffic and security controls
API Gateway provides throttling, quotas, request validation, and usage plans to manage consumer access and protect backends. It supports custom domains and TLS termination for public-facing endpoints. Authorization options include IAM, Cognito authorizers, and Lambda authorizers. These controls reduce the need to implement common gateway features in application code.
AWS-centric portability constraints
Configurations, security models, and operational workflows are closely aligned to AWS services and terminology. Migrating APIs to another cloud or to self-managed gateways can require reworking authentication, logging, and deployment pipelines. Some organizations treat this as vendor lock-in risk for long-lived API programs. Multi-cloud governance may require additional tooling and process to standardize across environments.
Complex pricing and cost predictability
Costs depend on API type, request volume, data transfer, caching, and optional features, which can make forecasting difficult. High-traffic or chatty client patterns may increase spend unexpectedly without careful throttling and monitoring. Comparing total cost across environments often requires detailed workload modeling. Finance and platform teams typically need guardrails and dashboards to manage ongoing cost.
API lifecycle tooling not complete
API Gateway focuses on runtime gateway capabilities rather than end-to-end API design, testing, and collaborative documentation workflows. Teams often rely on separate tools for API specification authoring, mock servers, automated functional testing, and developer collaboration. Developer portal experiences and API product management features may require additional AWS services or custom implementation. This can increase the number of tools and integration work for full lifecycle governance.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go Free tier/trial: Amazon API Gateway provides a Free Tier for new AWS customers: 1,000,000 REST API calls received/month, 1,000,000 HTTP API calls received/month, and 1,000,000 WebSocket messages + 750,000 connection minutes/month — available for up to 12 months for new accounts (per official page examples). See notes for AWS Free Tier credits on the official pricing page.
Example costs (official page examples, US pricing shown):
- HTTP APIs – $1.00 per million requests (example first tier) and $0.90 per million requests (example later tier). Example used in official page: 432M requests split as 300M * $1.00/million + 132M * $0.90/million.
- REST APIs (Edge Optimized / Regional) – example per-million rates shown on the official page: $3.50 per million, $2.80 per million, and $2.38 per million (used in the 15 billion requests example on the official page).
- Private REST APIs – API call charges as REST APIs plus AWS PrivateLink/VPC endpoint charges (example on page uses $0.01 per AZ per hour for the VPC endpoint and $0.01/GB data processing).
- Response Streaming (REST) – billed at standard REST API per-request rates (example uses $3.50 per million in the example) plus data transfer out charges.
- WebSocket APIs – Messaging: $1.00 per million messages (example); Connectivity: $0.25 per million connection minutes (example).
- API Gateway Portals – Official page example: Portal base monthly charge $125 (includes 10 PortalProducts with up to 40 ProductRestEndpoints each); additional PortalProducts charged at $12.50 per month (prorated).
- Caching example – 1.6 GB cache shown at $0.038 per hour (official example).
- Data transfer example – official page uses $0.09 per GB for data transfer out in examples (region-specific).
Discounts / notes:
- Pricing is pay-as-you-go; there are no minimum fees or upfront commitments. Additional charges may apply for data transfer, AWS PrivateLink, Lambda, CloudWatch, and other AWS services. Official page shows region/volume examples — actual rates can vary by region and volume and the official AWS pricing page should be consulted for region-specific SKUs and exact tier breakpoints.
Key official-source notes:
- Free tier limits apply to new AWS customers for up to 12 months; after that you pay standard pay-as-you-go rates.
- Pricing examples and rates above are taken from the Amazon API Gateway official pricing page (US examples).
Seller details
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Seattle, Washington, USA
2006
Subsidiary
https://aws.amazon.com/
https://x.com/awscloud
https://www.linkedin.com/company/amazon-web-services/
