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Confluent Cloud

iScore56–79 · of 4
www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud · Event streaming
SEPT 2026 audit

Managed Kafka from its original authors, billed on three meters at once — compute units by the hour, data moved by the gigabyte and data kept by the gigabyte-month.

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Entry paid planBasic gives the first eCKU free and charges $0.14 per eCKU-hour after it, so a small cluster starts near zero. Standard, the first tier with a 99.99% SLA, starts at about $385 a month.
CategoryEvent streaming

Updated 7 criteria comparedSources last checked

01.Evaluation guide

Who it suits

The reference implementation, and the one that shows its working. Three meters are each published with a rate, and the page states they are pre-replication — a disclosure the others skip entirely. Standard at about $385 a month is the cheapest 99.99% SLA in this category.

Consider something else if…

Your traffic is write-heavy and you are counting cents. Three meters compound: eCKU-hours accrue whether or not you publish, data in and out is $0.05 a gigabyte on Basic, and storage is $0.08 per gigabyte-month on every tier below Freight.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

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

Confluent Cloud pricing

3 criteria
Entry paid planBasic gives the first eCKU free and charges $0.14 per eCKU-hour after it, so a small cluster starts near zero. Standard, the first tier with a 99.99% SLA, starts at about $385 a month.
Sources (1) →
  • Confluent Cloud Pricing ↗

    “standard starting at ~$385/month great for most production-ready use cases with an extended feature set.”

    Read 2026-09-16 · official pricing

Pricing modelThree meters running together. Compute is billed per eCKU-hour — an elastic Confluent Kafka Unit that autoscales — data in and out is billed per GB, and data at rest per GB-month. The rates are published pre-replication, so a replicated topic costs a multiple of the figure shown.
Sources (1) →
  • Confluent Cloud Pricing ↗

    “eCKU ($/eCKU-hour) first eCKU free, then $0.14 $0.75 $1.75 - $2.25 $2.25 (minimum 2 eCKUs) data in/out (ingress/egress) ($/GB) $0.05 $0.035 - $0.050 $0.020 - $0.050 $0.014 - $0.030 data stored ($/GB-month) $0.08 $0.08 $0.08 $0.03 prices shown are pre-replication.”

    Read 2026-09-16 · official pricing

Egress over allowance$0.05 per GB in or out on Basic, falling to $0.014–$0.030 on Freight. Ingress and egress are charged at the same rate rather than separately.
Sources (1) →
  • Confluent Cloud Pricing ↗

    “data in/out (ingress/egress) ($/GB) $0.05 $0.035 - $0.050 $0.020 - $0.050 $0.014 - $0.030”

    Read 2026-09-16 · official pricing

Infrastructure

1 criteria
Uptime SLA99.99% on Standard and above. Basic carries no uptime commitment.
Sources (1) →
  • Confluent Cloud Pricing ↗

    “everything in basic high availability with 99.99% uptime SLA infinite storage audit logs to detect security threats”

    Read 2026-09-16 · official pricing

Storage

1 criteria
Storage price$0.08 per GB-month on Basic, Standard and Enterprise alike; $0.03 on Freight, which writes direct to object storage.
Sources (1) →

Auth

1 criteria
Audit logsAudit logs arrive on Standard, the first paid tier above Basic.
Sources (1) →
  • Confluent Cloud Pricing ↗

    “high availability with 99.99% uptime SLA infinite storage audit logs to detect security threats”

    Read 2026-09-16 · official pricing

Streaming

1 criteria
Partition limitNo figure is published. Enterprise advertises "enhanced partition limits" over Standard without saying what either limit is, so the ceiling cannot be compared with a vendor that states one.
Sources (1) →
  • Confluent Cloud Pricing ↗

    “everything in basic and standard private networking gbps+ autoscaling enhanced partition limits”

    Read 2026-09-16 · official pricing

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.