Three numbers. That's the whole price list.

Drag the data in and data out sliders to the sustained throughput you expect, from 1 MiB/s up to 10 GiB/s, and set a retention window. Storage is never typed in directly — it's derived from your data-in rate and retention, the same way it's billed.

The result updates instantly using ntail's list prices: $25 per 1 MiB/s of data in and data out, dropping to $20/MiB/s from 100 MiB/s and $15/MiB/s from 1 GiB/s in each direction, plus $20 per TB stored, dropping to $15 per TB from 50 TiB retained, with no charge for data transferred over the public internet.

Compressed. Every figure on this page — the sliders, ntail's own price, and the competitor comparison below — is modeled on compressed bytes on the wire, the same basis ntail bills on. If you only know the raw, uncompressed size of your records, a typical 3–5× compression ratio for JSON or Avro with a standard codec is a reasonable starting point before you drag the sliders.

Each provider is modeled from its own public list pricing, applied to the same workload you configure above:

AWS MSK (Serverless): $0.75/cluster-hour, $0.0015/partition-hour (partitions estimated from your data-in rate), $0.10/GB data in, $0.05/GB data out — MSK's own per-GB fees already cover delivery anywhere, including the public internet. Storage is $0.10/GB-month, and like Confluent, AWS documents this as billed on post-replication volume — at the default replication factor of 3, that's 3× the data you actually write.

Confluent Cloud (Standard): CKUs sized to your actual throughput at $0.75/CKU-hour, plus $0.05/GB ingress and egress and $0.08/GB-month storage (at Confluent's documented ~3× post-replication volume). Confluent's own documentation confirms cluster-level ingress and egress is metered on compressed wire bytes, so unlike WarpStream below, no gross-up is applied here.

WarpStream (BYOC): WarpStream's own software fee — a flat $500/month Fundamentals-tier cluster fee plus tiered per-GiB write and storage pricing, grossed up to WarpStream's uncompressed billing basis at the same 4× ratio — plus the customer's own AWS bill, which WarpStream's pricing explicitly excludes: EC2 instances to run the Agents (sized at ~170.7 MiB/s combined throughput per instance, from WarpStream's own published benchmark of 1 GiB/s across six m6in.4xlarge instances, at that instance's on-demand rate) and real Amazon S3 Standard storage at $0.023/GB-month for what's actually retained, plus standard public-internet egress (below) for the share of consumers outside your VPC.

Self-managed on AWS EC2: broker instances sized to your combined throughput, gp3 storage at 3× replication, and standard public-internet egress (below) on the share of reads that leave your VPC.

Public-internet egress: for WarpStream and self-managed EC2 — the two options with no metered "data out" fee of their own — we assume a third of consumers sit outside the cluster's VPC and bill that slice at $0.09/GB, AWS's standard internet data-transfer-out rate. MSK and Confluent aren't charged this separately, since their own per-GB egress fee already covers it.

These are illustrative, publicly-sourced list-price models, not live quotes, and will not match any one vendor's actual invoice exactly — discounts, commitments and regions all change the real number. Ask us for a modelled quote against your actual current bill.

Yes. Each cluster carries a minimum of 1 MiB/s in and 1 MiB/s out, which is $50 a month, or about 7 ¢ an hour. The calculator applies this floor automatically if your inputs would otherwise bill for less. There is no separate cluster fee on top of it.

No — ntail supports unlimited retention, on the same volume-priced storage rate whether it's your first terabyte or your ten-thousandth. The calculator's retention slider tops out at 90 days purely to keep the modeled workload realistic to look at — that's not a product limit.