Kong team is pretty responsive to emails and followups. They have a good understanding of your product in general. Some advisors are more knowledgeable about our use case and are more helpful with that. Primary communication is from email, and things would go faster sometimes if it was Teams meetings or phone calls. Sometimes it would be helpful if they sought to understand more of what I was trying to do before providing an answer. A couple things were deprecated that we were using and I wonder if some of this stems from some startup growing pains of finding what works best.

Kong fell short in some areas. Specifically, our team identified a couple of bugs and issues in the Gateway. It took too long to recognise and to solve the bugs. Some of those issues seemed to highlight that Kong wasn't being used use cases as large as ours. While Kong provides a large plugin ecosystem, it is still hard to customize some specific aspects (e.g., rate limits).