Apigee is Google Cloud's API management suite — great if you live in GCP. Mainframe is cloud-agnostic, usage-priced, and shipped for modern stacks. . Bring your own credentials.
Apigee is enterprise API management tied to Google Cloud. Mainframe is a usage-priced proxy to 110M+ external APIs that runs anywhere you call it from.
Full API management: publish, secure, analyze, monetize your APIs. Pricing starts at the ~ Pay-as-you-go tier and moves up to Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus subscriptions (mid-five to six figures annually). Deeply integrated with Google Cloud.
Universal proxy to 110M+ external APIs. Flat . Runs in front of any stack — AWS, GCP, Azure, Fly, a laptop. No GCP project required. Credentials stay with you.
Honest comparison. Apigee is a deep platform — Mainframe solves a smaller, sharper problem for less money.
| Apigee | Mainframe | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary use case | Manage & monetize the APIs you publish | Route & meter the APIs you consume (110M+ of them) |
| Pricing (published) | Pay-as-you-go ~ minimum; Standard/Enterprise tiers quote-based | base, premium |
| Cloud footprint | Google Cloud. GCP project, IAM, billing account required. | Anywhere. Single HTTPS endpoint. No cloud lock-in. |
| Setup time | Hours to days — GCP project, Apigee org, proxy bundles, deploy | 5 minutes. Paste credential, make call. |
| Who holds credentials | Stored in Apigee KVM / Google Secret Manager | You. Sent per-call in X-Upstream-Auth. Never stored. |
| Catalog of upstream APIs | N/A — you proxy ones you configure | 110,681,157 catalog entries, 130 production-wired adapters |
| Best fit | GCP-native enterprises productizing their own APIs | Modern builders consuming many external APIs and paying by usage |
| What we are NOT | Not a full API management suite. No developer portal, no monetization billing for your APIs, no GCP-grade analytics. If you're publishing APIs to external devs, Apigee is the tool. | |
Keep Apigee for the APIs you publish. Use Mainframe for the external APIs your Apigee proxies call — Stripe, Salesforce, Twilio, Bloomberg, Epic, the long tail. Two different problems, two different tools.
Beta is open. . Bring your own credentials.
Join the Beta