Which side are you on: "This is just what Kafka costs at scale" or "We should switch to a cheaper Kafka provider"?
At Conduktor, our field team works inside Kafka environments that have been running for a long time. We see this: most Kafka teams are overpaying by 25 to 40 percent. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because of how Kafka got built up over time.
The cost drivers of Kafka are weirdly context-dependent: the infrastructure and the provider are a tiny part of the full picture.
The "how" it's being used is the real question.
Five bad patterns eating budget
