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Amazon MSK

iScore37–61 · #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

Updated 8 criteria comparedSources last checked

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) →
  • AWS Price List — Amazon MSK, US East (N. Virginia) ↗

    “$0.75 per cluster-hour for serverless cluster in US East (N. Virginia) [...] $0.0015 per partition-hour for serverless cluster in US East (N. Virginia) [...] $0.10 per GB data in for serverless cluster in US East (N. Virginia)”

    Read 2026-09-16 · official pricing

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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Every page here is sourced and dated.