# WarpStream

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/streaming/warpstream/

A Kafka-compatible service that writes straight to object storage, billed on a single meter — the gigabytes you write — with no inter-zone replication to pay for.

## Who it suits

Write-heavy workloads where inter-zone replication is the bill. Data is acknowledged straight into your own object storage, so partitions, reads and storage are not metered at all and only gigabytes written are — $0.01 falling to $0.003 at volume.

Consider something else if You need an availability commitment at the entry price. The $100 Dev tier carries no uptime SLA whatsoever; the first one is Fundamentals at $500, five times the floor. Lower latency is a Pro-tier feature, which is the honest cost of the object-storage design.

## iScore

67 / 100 (80% interval 55–78), rank 3 of 4 in streaming — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every streaming peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/streaming/warpstream/alternatives/

- Price: 78 (57–99), weight 36%, 3 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: egress_overage_price, free_tier, storage_price
- Capacity and limits: 48 (26–71), weight 29%, 1 of 1 criteria scored
- Trust and compliance: 50 (25–76), weight 21%, 1 of 4 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: audit_logs, rbac, sso_saml
- Evidence: 100 (100–100), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Kind of free offer: Free credit ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)
- Credit card to start: No ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)
- Entry paid plan: $100 a month for the Dev tier, which carries NO uptime SLA, before any per-gibibyte write charge. The first tier with an SLA is Fundamentals at $500. ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)
- Pricing model: Two lines, not one. A cluster-tier fee — $100 a month for Dev, $500 for Fundamentals, $1,500 for Pro — plus write throughput metered per gibibyte: $0.01/GiB to 50 TiB, falling to $0.003 beyond 6,250 TiB. Reads, partitions and storage are not billed; data sits in your own object storage. ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)

### Infrastructure

- Uptime SLA: None at all on the $100 Dev tier. 99.9% on Fundamentals, 99.99% on Pro, and 99.999% on Enterprise only with multi-region clusters — 99.99% without. ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)

### Storage

- Storage price: Not charged separately. Data is persisted directly to your own object storage, so durability is the object store's bill rather than WarpStream's. ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)

### Queues

- Message retention: 7 days on the configuration the pricing calculator shows. ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)

### Streaming

- Throughput ceiling: The calculator runs from 1 MiB/s to 5 GiB/s of uncompressed write throughput, and the rate falls as the tier rises rather than the ceiling being fixed. ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)
- Partition limit: 4,096 on Dev, 16,384 on Fundamentals, 50,000 on Pro and 200,000+ on Enterprise. Partitions are capped by tier and not billed. ([source](https://www.warpstream.com/pricing), read 2026-09-16)

## Compared with

- [WarpStream vs Confluent Cloud](https://inetgeek.com/compare/confluent-cloud-vs-warpstream/)
- [WarpStream vs Amazon MSK](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-msk-vs-warpstream/)
- [WarpStream vs Redpanda](https://inetgeek.com/compare/warpstream-vs-redpanda/)