Kong Gateway 3.10 Dropped Free Mode: What OSS Users Need to Know
Kong Gateway 3.10 quietly dropped free mode — here’s what we actually know
If you went looking for a formal announcement from Kong Inc. about the end of OSS support, you won’t find one. That appears to be deliberate. But the practical reality is visible in the release artifacts: starting with 3.10.0 (released March 2025), there are no public Docker images for a community build, and the free-mode behavior that previously let you run the gateway without a commercial license has been removed.
Running kong-gateway:3.10+ without a valid license no longer gives you a stripped-down free tier. It gives you expired-Enterprise behavior — most features locked out, essentially unusable for production work.
3.9.1 is the line in the sand
The last OSS image published to Docker Hub is kong:3.9.1. That release is still available and still functional. But it’s frozen. Security patches and feature development are happening on the Enterprise side only.
For teams that pinned to a specific version and aren’t chasing new features, staying on 3.9.1 is workable short-term. The risk compounds over time: a CVE patched in Enterprise but not in the OSS build puts you in an uncomfortable spot, and that gap will only grow.
Why there’s no official statement
Community threads on both GitHub and Kong Nation have asked directly. GitHub Discussion #14405 asked about the missing 3.10 Docker images; Issue #14833 asked outright whether the community edition is dead. Responses from Kong staff have been sparse and non-committal.
This is a recognizable pattern in commercial open-source. An explicit “OSS is dead” announcement creates immediate PR backlash, hands ammunition to competitors, and accelerates churn. Silence plus changed product behavior achieves the same business result with far less friction. It’s not a good look, but it’s not without precedent — Redis, Elastic, and HashiCorp all navigated similar transitions in their own ways.
What your options look like
There are three realistic paths:
- Stay on 3.9.1. Viable if your environment is stable and you can accept growing security risk. Set up CVE monitoring for Kong-related dependencies and treat this as a stopgap, not a long-term strategy.
- License Kong Gateway Enterprise. The direct path if Kong’s plugin ecosystem is a hard dependency. Pricing targets mid-to-large organizations, so factor that in early.
- Migrate to an alternative. Envoy Gateway is CNCF-backed and deeply Kubernetes-native. Apache APISIX is closest in feature parity to what Kong OSS offered. Traefik is simpler but less suited to full API gateway workloads.
Migration takes real planning. On Kubernetes, the Kong Ingress Controller complicates the swap — budget time for config translation and plugin equivalency checks before committing to a direction.
One more thing to watch
Kong’s version support policy page is the closest thing to an official source on this. It doesn’t declare OSS dead outright, but the absence of any community release cadence past 3.9.1 is itself a statement. If a formal announcement ever does come, that’s where it will likely appear first.
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