WarpStream made its name as the cheap, independent alternative to Confluent — a "bring your own cloud" (BYOC) Kafka built on object storage instead of local disks. That pitch has gotten more complicated. Confluent acquired WarpStream in September 2024, and IBM completed its own acquisition of Confluent in March 2026 — so the product that undercut Confluent's pricing is now a subsidiary two levels inside the company it was built to compete with. Here's what WarpStream actually costs today, and what's worth thinking about before you build on it.
The workload
10 MiB/s of compressed data in, 20 MiB/s of compressed data out (a common 2× fan-out), 7‑day retention — roughly 6.3 TB retained at any time. The same workload we use in our other comparisons, including AWS MSK.
Pricing, side by side
| ntail | WarpStream (BYOC) | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Pay as you go, per started hourData in, data out, storage — nothing else | Flat software fee + tiered per-GiBPlus your own separate cloud bill |
| WarpStream software fee | — | $500/mo cluster feeFundamentals tier, flat regardless of usage |
| Write & storage (WarpStream's own meter) | $25 per 1 MiB/s / monthMetered compressed, the same bytes you send | ≈$1,124/mo combinedTiered per-GiB, metered on uncompressed volume |
| Your own cloud infrastructure | Included | ≈$2,584/moEC2 instances to run the Agents, plus S3 storage — billed to you directly, not to WarpStream |
| Public internet traffic | $0 — never metered | ≈$1,631/moStandard AWS egress rate on the share of reads leaving your VPC |
| Example monthly cost10 MiB/s in · 20 MiB/s out · 7-day retention | $876 | $5,839 |
Illustrative, list-price figures. WarpStream meters writes and storage on an uncompressed basis, so we gross up from compressed bytes at a 4× ratio to match its published pricing. The full model — including the Agent instance sizing and S3 storage assumptions — is documented in our pricing calculator FAQ. Ask us for a quote modeled against your actual bill.
The quoted price isn't the whole bill
WarpStream's own fee — the flat $500 cluster charge plus its tiered per-GiB rate — is genuinely the cheaper-looking number on its pricing page. But BYOC means WarpStream's software runs on compute you provision and pay for directly: EC2 instances to run its Agents, and S3 for storage. On this workload that's roughly $2,584 a month that never appears on a WarpStream invoice at all — it shows up on your AWS bill instead, alongside standard AWS egress on whatever share of your reads leave the VPC. Add it up and the software fee is under a fifth of the real total.
Public cloud only
BYOC also means WarpStream only runs where your cloud account runs — inside AWS today, with GCP and Azure control-plane support still on its public roadmap. There's no path to running it on infrastructure you own, on-premises, or fully off the public cloud; the product is architecturally tied to a hyperscaler account. If data residency or a fully off-cloud deployment is a real requirement for you, that's not a configuration option WarpStream has — it's a different product shape entirely.
Two acquisitions in under two years
WarpStream's team has said existing customers and its roadmap continue unchanged under Confluent and now IBM, and there's no reason to doubt that's true today. But a product's pricing and priorities ultimately follow whoever owns it, and WarpStream's owner has changed twice in less than two years — most recently to a company where Kafka streaming is one piece of a much larger enterprise data and AI platform, not the whole business. That's a reasonable thing to price in before standing up critical infrastructure on it for the next five years, independent of whether anything actually changes.
A European company, on our own European infrastructure
ntail is operated by Factual Tech AB, a company registered in Sweden. Customer data is processed and stored in the EU by default — other regions, including the US, available on request — on infrastructure we operate ourselves. For teams with stricter residency or sovereignty requirements, we can also run a dedicated cluster fully off the public cloud, in a specific region of your choice. See how we handle security for the full detail.
Which one is right for you
If you're committed to running your own cloud infrastructure and the combined bill still works out, WarpStream is a real option. But if the software fee isn't the whole cost, public-cloud-only doesn't fit your requirements, or you'd rather not build on a product two ownership changes deep, it's worth modeling your own workload against ntail's pricing, or seeing how ntail compares to the other managed streaming options.