Cut the Costs of Hosted Apache Kafka® With Confluent Cloud’s Price Guarantee

In today’s cost-conscious climate, every line item on your cloud bill is under the microscope. That makes now the ideal time to rethink your data streaming strategy. For many teams, using a hyperscaler-hosted Apache Kafka® service feels like the easy choice—one vendor, one bill, no additional contracts, and minimal setup. It makes sense early on, especially for small-scale projects or basic use cases. But, as your Kafka usage grows and becomes mission-critical, that simplicity comes at a cost.

What starts as a straightforward solution quickly adds infrastructure costs and becomes a long-term burden. Your top platform engineers spend more time firefighting issues—patching, manual scaling, and troubleshooting clusters—which often results in overprovisioned clusters and high networking costs instead of building features that matter to customers. The result: you’re left managing infrastructure instead of innovating.

That’s the difference between a hosted Kafka service and a fully managed, enterprise-grade data streaming platform like Confluent Cloud. It’s not just easier to operate—it’s designed for scale and reliability, while reducing infrastructure costs by 60% or more. We’re so confident that Confluent Cloud delivers better performance at lower cost, we back it with our Price Guarantee.

Here's a quick recap of the common pitfalls of hyperscaler-hosted Kafka—and how Confluent helps you avoid them entirely. For an even deeper look at this topic, check out the first two blogs in this series:

• Why Hosted Apache Kafka® Leaves You Holding the Bag

• Introducing Private Network Interface: Secure Private Networking on AWS for 50% Less

Four Hyperscaler Hurdles and How Confluent Solves Them

Opting for a hyperscaler-hosted Kafka service like Amazon MSK, Azure Event Hubs, or Google’s Managed Kafka often presents four significant challenges that can impede your progress and inflate your costs. Here’s a look at those pain points and how Confluent provides a direct solution for each:

1. The Hyperscaler Hurdle: High and Unpredictable Infrastructure Costs

Though the initial “sticker price” for a hyperscaler-hosted Kafka service can seem promising in the beginning, the total cost is often high and unpredictable. To handle potential traffic spikes without outages, teams are forced to overprovision infrastructure—often by 50% or more—leading to significant waste on idle capacity. Furthermore, hidden costs quickly escalate, particularly networking fees for cross-Availability Zone (cross-AZ) traffic, which can amount to 80-90% of your total infrastructure costs. The real expense is paid in engineering hours, operational toil, and architectural compromises.

The Confluent Advantage: Lower Infrastructure Costs by 60% or More

Confluent is proven to reduce the infrastructure bills for Kafka workloads by 60% or more by targeting every major cost driver. Confluent’s cloud-native Kora Engine operates up to 70% more efficiently in the cloud. Confluent Cloud is designed to seamlessly handle elastic workloads, removing the operational burden and cost of manual management. Enterprise clusters autoscale from zero to massive workloads (GBps+) to meet unpredictable spikes, and scale back down as demand subsides—so you only pay for what you use. Freight Clusters can cut exorbitant cross-AZ networking fees by up to 90%, and our Private Networking Interface (PNI) provides a low-cost alternative to expensive private networking options. As a truly fully managed service, Confluent also removes the significant costs of operational toil, freeing valuable engineering talent from managing, patching, and troubleshooting Kafka.

2. The Hyperscaler Hurdle: Significant Manual Maintenance

The term “fully managed” can be misleading. With hyperscalers, you are often still on the hook for complex operational tasks, including dealing with complicated storage configurations, strict per-broker limits, cumbersome data cleanup, and managing layouts and quotas. There is no built-in workload isolation, so traffic spikes from one application can destabilize the entire cluster. Furthermore, you may find yourself using incomplete infrastructure-as-code tooling, forcing your engineers to build and maintain custom processes for day-to-day operations while relying on unsupported UIs for management, which can come at an additional cost.

The Confluent Advantage: Truly Fully Managed

Confluent Cloud offers a true serverless experience with instant provisioning, proactive monitoring, and automated, zero-downtime upgrades within safe update windows. The platform provides per-client quotas for tenant isolation to prevent “noisy neighbor” problems, a comprehensive Terraform provider for complete automation of your infrastructure deployments, and 120+ pre-built connectors to simplify your architecture. Your engineers can finally focus on building applications, not managing infrastructure.

3. The Hyperscaler Hurdle: Gaps in Resilience

The 99.9% SLAs offered by most hyperscalers typically only cover the underlying infrastructure, but exclude failures caused by the Kafka software itself. This leaves your team responsible for tackling challenges like identifying and replacing failed brokers under pressure, risking cascading outages from issues like full storage volumes or degraded hardware, and leading to significant downtime.

The Confluent Advantage: Global Availability

Confluent Cloud offers a financially-backed, 99.99% uptime SLA that covers the entire service, including Kafka. Our Kora Engine is fault-tolerant by design, decoupling compute from storage to prevent outages from disk exhaustion. The service continuously monitors and replaces degraded hardware, accelerating recovery from days to seconds. Cluster Linking and Schema Linking keep data and metadata in sync across clouds for multi-region disaster recovery.

4. The Hyperscaler Hurdle: Limited Flexibility and Vendor Lock-In

Hyperscaler-hosted Kafka services lock you into a single cloud ecosystem with limited options for on-premises or multi-cloud deployments. This creates data silos and prevents you from building a unified, persistent bridge for your data that can span from the datacenter to the cloud and across multiple clouds.

The Confluent Advantage: Flexible Deployment Across Environments

Confluent provides true deployment flexibility that spans across all your environments, and helps you seamlessly connect your data and apps everywhere they reside. You can quickly provision Confluent as a consistent, fully managed service on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, avoiding vendor lock-in. You can also deploy on-premises and at the edge with Confluent Platform, leverage a fully managed service with Confluent Cloud, and even seamlessly build a persistent bridge connecting your edge locations, datacenters, and cloud environments with Cluster Linking for your hybrid cloud and multicloud scenarios.

The Confluent Cloud Price Guarantee: Better, Simpler, and Guaranteed to Cost Less

Are you overpaying for the hosted Kafka service from your hyperscaler? It's time to invest in a better, simpler platform that accelerates your business—not one that just adds to your operational backlog. We are confident that Confluent Cloud delivers a superior data streaming platform at a guaranteed lower total cost than hyperscaler alternatives.

Over 6,000 customers worldwide—including Notion, L'Oréal, Michelin, Nuuly, RBC, Meesho, and Sainsbury’s—rely on Confluent Cloud to run Kafka at scale. These organizations, spanning a wide range of use cases and workload sizes, have achieved 40-70% savings on Kafka costs. But you don’t have to take our word for it—see the numbers for yourself. Our cost estimator is the first step for any organization using or considering a hyperscaler-hosted Kafka service.

Discover how much you can save:

1. Estimate your costs: Visit our online Cost Estimator for a personalized breakdown of your potential savings compared to hyperscaler-hosted Kafka services.

2. Schedule a deeper analysis: After you use the estimator, one of our experts will reach out to conduct a detailed TCO comparison, showing you why Confluent is the better, more cost-effective option for your specific workloads.

Ready to see the difference? Calculate your potential savings today.