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Amazon MSK pricing and limits

iScore45–74 · ≈#4/4
aws.amazon.com/msk · Event streaming
SEPT 2026 audit

Managed Kafka on AWS, whose serverless tier meters five separate dimensions at once — cluster-hours, partition-hours, data in, data out and storage.

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Entry paid plan$0.75 per cluster-hour on Serverless — about $547 a month for a cluster that has moved no data at all, before partitions, transfer or storage are counted.
CategoryEvent streaming

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 8 criteria comparedSources last checked

Amazon MSK pricing at a glance

Entry paid plan
$0.75 per cluster-hour on Serverless — about $547 a month for a cluster that has moved no data at all, before partitions, transfer or… source ↗
Pricing model
Serverless bills FIVE dimensions simultaneously: $0.75 per cluster-hour, $0.0015 per partition-hour, $0.10 per GB in, $0.05 per GB out and… source ↗
Egress over allowance
$0.05 per GB out and $0.10 per GB in on Serverless source ↗

First line of each sourced value. The full text is in Amazon MSK pricing below.

01.Evaluation guide

Who it suits

You are already on AWS and want Kafka inside the same IAM, the same VPC and the same bill. Serverless scales partitions for you and states no maximum retention at all, which nothing else here offers.

Consider something else if…

You want to predict the bill. Five meters run at once and the floor is $0.75 per cluster-hour — about $547 a month before a byte moves. Ingress costs twice egress, the reverse of most of this corpus, and the 2,400-partition ceiling costs about $2.65 a day carrying no traffic.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria Amazon MSK does not publish are not listed.

Amazon MSK pricing

3 criteria
Entry paid plan$0.75 per cluster-hour on Serverless — about $547 a month for a cluster that has moved no data at all, before partitions, transfer or storage are counted.
Sources (1) →
Pricing modelServerless bills FIVE dimensions simultaneously: $0.75 per cluster-hour, $0.0015 per partition-hour, $0.10 per GB in, $0.05 per GB out and $0.10 per GB-month stored. Provisioned clusters swap the first two for a per-broker hourly rate. Nothing here is a single number.
Sources (1) →
Egress over allowance$0.05 per GB out and $0.10 per GB in on Serverless. Ingress costs twice egress here, which is the reverse of most of this site's corpus.
Sources (1) →

Storage

1 criteria
Storage price$0.10 per GB-month on Serverless.
Sources (1) →

Queues

2 criteria
Maximum message size8 MiB on Serverless. A larger message fails outright with INVALID_REQUEST rather than being throttled.
Sources (1) →
Message retentionUnlimited. Serverless states no maximum retention duration, where WarpStream's published configuration is seven days.
Sources (1) →

Streaming

2 criteria
Throughput ceiling200 Mbps ingress and 400 Mbps egress per Serverless cluster, throttled rather than refused. That is 25 MB/s in — a quarter of what Redpanda Serverless states, once the units are read.
Sources (1) →
Partition limit2,400 partition leaders per Serverless cluster for non-compacted topics, and 120 for compacted ones. Partitions are metered as well as capped — $0.0015 per partition-hour, so 2,400 of them cost about $2.65 a day carrying no traffic.
Sources (1) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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Amazon MSK in the news

Headlines from other publications, not checked by us · collected

Selected by a search on this company, refreshed weekly. Nobody here has verified these claims — where something material is confirmed, it is written into the page above with its source, the way every other fact on this site is.

Amazon MSK pricing questions

How much does Amazon MSK cost?

$0.75 per cluster-hour on Serverless — about $547 a month for a cluster that has moved no data at all, before partitions, transfer or storage are counted.

AWS Price List — Amazon MSK, US East (N. Virginia) · read

How does Amazon MSK charge?

Serverless bills FIVE dimensions simultaneously: $0.75 per cluster-hour, $0.0015 per partition-hour, $0.10 per GB in, $0.05 per GB out and $0.10 per GB-month stored. Provisioned clusters swap the first two for a per-broker hourly rate. Nothing here is a single number.

AWS Price List — Amazon MSK, US East (N. Virginia) · read

How much does Amazon MSK charge for egress?

$0.05 per GB out and $0.10 per GB in on Serverless. Ingress costs twice egress here, which is the reverse of most of this site's corpus.

AWS Price List — Amazon MSK, US East (N. Virginia) · read

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Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.