Blog
Keep up to date with your ntail and Kafka knowledge
Posts
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Open source
Introducing ntk: a fast, friendly CLI and TUI for Kafka
Our open source Kafka tool: one binary, a profile per cluster, a terminal UI that teaches you the CLI, and raw bytes you can pipe straight into jq.
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Deep dive
Your JSON is fine. Your batch size isn't.
We encoded 50,000 real GitHub events four ways and compressed them like Kafka does. After zstd, JSON beat Protobuf — and batch depth moved the bill 3.2×.
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Comparison
ntail vs. Redpanda Serverless: cost and the throughput cap
Real published pricing, but every cluster caps out at 100 MB/s ingress, and the same workload costs about 4.6× as much.
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Comparison
ntail vs. WarpStream: pricing, egress and who owns it now
The software fee isn't the whole bill once your own cloud account is added in — and the product is now owned by IBM via Confluent.
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Comparison
ntail vs. AWS MSK: cost, egress and lock-in
MSK meters data in and data out separately, with no free allowance — and leaving later costs you again on the way out.
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Cost breakdown
ntail vs. self-managed Kafka on AWS: what it really costs
Kafka is free. Instances, EBS storage, egress and the instance size it takes to keep disks fed are not — a real breakdown, not a licensing pitch.
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Comparison
ntail vs. Confluent Cloud: price and simplicity, side by side
Same workload, two invoices. Why ntail's pay-as-you-go pricing and EU hosting come out ahead of Confluent's CKU-based model.
Stop paying to move your own data
Start on the free plan today — no card, no time limit — or see how the same workload prices out across every provider we've modelled.