Developer portal in Saudi Arabia: one place for your API catalogue, documentation, keys and onboarding

Buyers use several names for related things:

• API developer portal, or API portal: the public or partner-facing website for your APIs, the subject of this page.
• API catalog: the list of APIs inside the portal, each with an owner, a version and a status. A catalogue without owners goes stale within months.
• API documentation portal: documentation only, with no sign-up or keys. A reasonable first step.
• Internal developer portal: in platform engineering, a catalogue of an organisation's own services, pipelines and owners. When the need is internal teams finding and using shared APIs, an API portal with private visibility often covers it.

A portal sits on top of API management: the inventory, access policy and versioning rules come first. Our API management practice explains that order.

Across sectors, more parties want to call your systems, and handing out access by hand does not scale.

• Banks and fintechs. Open banking brings third parties that need to discover APIs, register applications and test before production. Our open banking page sets out where Kong fits.
• Telecoms. Wholesale partners, resellers and enterprise customers want provisioning, billing or messaging APIs, each with its own limits and credentials.
• Government entities. Agencies exchange data with each other and with private-sector integrators. A portal gives each consumer the same documentation and request process, with a recorded approval for each access.
• Internal teams. Teams rebuild integrations because they cannot find each other's APIs. A private catalogue ends that.

For connections to national platforms, see our guide to integrating with Saudi digital platforms.

Relatedopen banking pageintegrating with Saudi digital platforms

Kong's current Dev Portal is part of Kong Konnect, the platform Kong hosts. Kong's upgrade documentation states that, from Kong Gateway 3.5, the Enterprise Developer Portal is no longer included in Kong Gateway Enterprise. So a new portal in practice means a portal in Konnect, connected to gateways you can run yourself.

That separation is useful in Saudi Arabia. The gateway data planes that carry API requests and responses can run on infrastructure you operate in the Kingdom, so payloads stay there. What the portal holds is different: API descriptions, documentation, developer accounts and application records. Whether that may sit in a hosted platform is a data classification decision for your risk and compliance teams. We confirm where each Konnect component runs before a design is agreed. Our Kong implementation page compares the gateway's self-managed and hybrid shapes.

A bilingual portal is more than a translated home page:

• Right-to-left layout for Arabic pages, with code samples, URLs and JSON kept left-to-right inside them.
• One glossary. Agree the Arabic term for consumer, scope, token and rate limit once, and use it everywhere.
• Specifications and guides kept apart. Field names stay as they are in the specification; the explanations around them are written in Arabic.
• Arabic examples. Requests and responses with Arabic names and addresses.
• Both languages released together. A new API version is not published until both versions of its documentation are ready.

Kong licensing is quoted on Kong's terms, alongside Interkey's services on lines of their own. What moves the cost and the timeline: the number of APIs in the first release, whether their specifications already exist, how many audiences the portal serves, whether staff and partners sign in through your identity platform, how much documentation must be written in two languages, and your security review. An estimate follows the first workshop, not before it.