Kafka Cluster
Indicative from-price range
Indicative from-price range for self-hosting Kafka Cluster on 3 servers: about $72 to $337 per month (USD), as of 2026-10-19, for the reference workload (Broker nodes: 3; Retained data (GB): 1000; Partition count: 100; Peak ingress throughput (MB/s): 100). From-price by provider, each the cheapest server in that provider's own shortlist: $72 on DigitalOcean (basic-2vcpu-4gb, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, fra1); $147 on Google Cloud (e2-standard-2, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, us-central1); $190 on Amazon Web Services (c9g.large, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, us-east-1); $192 on OVHcloud (rise-1, 6 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, eu-west); $199 on Microsoft Azure (D2as_v7, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, eastus); $199 on Hetzner (AX41, 6 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, eu-central); $787 on Servers.com (dl-01, 8 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, eu-west).
Reference workload
- Broker nodes: 3
- Retained data (GB): 1000
- Partition count: 100
- Peak ingress throughput (MB/s): 100
Methodology
This range is generated automatically from public provider price lists. It has not been reviewed by a person, it is not a quote, and it may differ from the total the calculator chooses for your own workload with its AI step. Method: the calculator's offer shortlist for the reference workload (the same ranking it builds before the AI step, up to 12 offers across providers; 12 here) is priced at its monthly list price in USD. The low end is the cheapest of the per-provider from-prices below and the high end is the median server of the combined shortlist, each multiplied by 3, the smallest baseline topology (replicated-broker-cluster). The from-price for each provider applies the same method to that provider's own shortlist (the calculator's ranking restricted to that provider), so it is the cheapest server that ranking offers there, not a recommendation. Prices are taken from the price snapshot dated 2026-10-19; prices quoted in EUR are converted with the ECB reference rate dated 2026-10-19. Servers with fewer than 2 vCPU or less than 4 GB RAM are not priced. Only server rental list prices for the product's own servers are counted: dependencies, licences, support, traffic charges, taxes and setup fees are not included.
Price sources
- Amazon Web Services: https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonEC2/current/us-east-1/index.json
- DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
- Google Cloud: https://cloudbilling.googleapis.com/v1/services/6F81-5844-456A/skus
- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/_resources/app/data/app/live_data_en_EUR.json
- Microsoft Azure: https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices
- OVHcloud: https://eu.api.ovh.com/1.0/order/catalog/public/eco?ovhSubsidiary=FR
- Servers.com: https://www.servers.com/products/scalable-bare-metal
Size Kafka Cluster for your own workloadMarkdown versionFor AI agents (llms.txt)
Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform, originally developed at LinkedIn, used to publish, subscribe to, store, and process high-throughput streams of records in real time. It underpins messaging, log aggregation, and stream-processing pipelines at large scale.
Baseline topologies
| Topology | Minimum nodes | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| replicated-broker-cluster | 3 | broker |
| broker-plus-dedicated-controllers | 5 | broker, controller |
What drives the cost
- Broker nodes
- Number of broker nodes participating in the cluster.
- Retained data (GB)
- Approximate retained dataset before replica overhead.
- Partition count
- Expected partition count across topics.
Where it runs
bare_metal, dedicated, cloud_vm
Size Kafka Cluster and get a cost estimate