APISIX
Cloud-native API and AI gateway
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Mar 2026
APISIX is an API gateway built on Nginx and Lua that sits in front of your microservices, handling routing, authentication, rate limiting, and payload transformation fast enough for serious traffic. It routes API calls to the right backend service and applies policies (auth, rate limits, logging) without changing your application code.
Fully free under Apache 2.0. APISIX is an Apache Software Foundation project with no commercial entity gating features. You get the full gateway: dynamic routing, load balancing, 80+ plugins (auth, observability, traffic control), gRPC support, and a dashboard. Plugins are hot-reloadable, no restarts required.
The catch: the Lua/OpenResty foundation is niche. If your team doesn't know Lua, writing custom plugins is a steep learning curve. Envoy and Traefik have larger communities and more ecosystem integrations. And while APISIX is fast, the operational complexity of running an API gateway at scale (high availability, configuration management, monitoring) is real regardless of which tool you pick.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFully open source under Apache 2.0 with no commercial gating.
Self-hosted cost: The gateway itself is free. You need etcd for configuration storage (lightweight, can share existing infrastructure). Total cost is your VPS/Kubernetes infrastructure.
Compared to commercial gateways:
- Kong Enterprise: Starts around $35K/year for enterprise features (RBAC, developer portal)
- AWS API Gateway: $3.50 per million API calls + data transfer
- Apigee: Enterprise pricing, typically $10K+/month
APISIX gives you 90% of Kong Enterprise's features for $0. The 10% gap is commercial support, enterprise UI, and vendor SLAs.
Free. Apache Foundation project with no paid tier. Saves thousands versus commercial API gateways.
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