Honestly, three weeks is tight but doable if you dont overcomplicate things. Apigee is definitely overkill for a seed stage budget and will just slow you down with sales calls. I dealt with a similar crunch and Kong Gateway Open Source 3.x Edition worked out fine once I stopped trying to use the enterprise UI and just stuck to the CLI. If you are really stressed about the Kong learning curve, you should look at:

• Tyk Open Source API Gateway Binary which feels a bit more intuitive for rate limiting
• KrakenD Community Edition 2.x Stateless Gateway if latency is your absolute top priority Given your finance app context, Kong is solid because of the plugin ecosystem. Just use Kong decK Configuration Tool to handle your routes and rate limits in a flat file. It makes the daunting setup way more manageable for a small team.

@Reply #2 - good point! If you need to hit that three-week deadline with zero budget, try KrakenD API Gateway v2.7.

• It is stateless and configures via a simple JSON file, saving database setup time.
• Extremely low latency because it runs on Go.
• Free and handles rate limiting natively. I can share a basic config template if you want to skip the docs.

Like someone mentioned, Apigee is way too heavy for a seed stage startup under a three-week crunch. If you want to bypass Kong entirely, here are two solid alternatives we have run in production:

• Apache APISIX: Built on OpenResty like Kong but has a much friendlier dashboard out of the box. Latency is incredibly low and rate limiting is easy to script.
• KrakenD: If you just need pure speed and basic rate limiting, this is a beast. It is stateless and runs on minimal hardware. You could host it on a cheap AWS EC2 c6g.medium Instance and it will barely sweat. For resource planning, search GitHub for the api-gateway-benchmark repo to see how they stack up. Let me know if you need some boilerplate Docker Compose files to get started, I can throw some your way.

I am in the exact same boat with a fintech build right now. Three weeks is brutal for infrastructure, honestly. I spent all weekend stressing over latency spikes with DeepSeek V4 Pro and getting the rate limiting dialed in. If you want to keep it simple, skip the heavy gateways and just toss Nginx Plus R12 in front of it. It is incredibly stable and takes like an afternoon to get the rate limiting headers working. Most people overthink the gateway part when a solid reverse proxy handles 90 percent of the traffic management needs without all the extra bloat. Good luck with the Chicago launch, hope the stress levels go down soon.