Cost No extra public internet fees, at any volume.
Cut your Kafka bill without cutting throughput
Most Kafka bills aren't the cluster — they're the bandwidth. ntail charges $0 for public internet traffic at any volume, meters what you actually push through rather than what you provisioned for a peak, and carries no cluster fee at all.
- No bandwidth fee
- No cluster fee
- Billed per started hour
- Free migration
Example monthly invoice
10 MiB/s in · 20 MiB/s out · 7-day retention- Data in10 MiB/s × $25
- $250
- Data out20 MiB/s × $25
- $500
- Storage7 days of writes ≈ 6.3 TB × $20
- $126
- Public internet trafficData sent and read, any volume
- $0
Illustrative example at list price. Data in and out are measured compressed, storage sized from 7-day retention. No cluster fee — the only floor is 1 MiB/s in and 1 MiB/s out per cluster. Model your own workload.
- $0Extra fees for public internet traffic
- 99.99%Contractual uptime SLA
- Up to 80%Lower spend than typical managed streaming
- $50/moPer-cluster minimum, about 7¢/hour
Same workload, three bills
The bandwidth line is usually where it goes wrong
A typical managed or self-managed setup metering the same traffic charges separately for every gigabyte in and out. ntail doesn't.
Same workload, three providers
10 MiB/s in, 20 MiB/s out (compressed), 7-day retention — monthly, at list price.
Illustrative comparison based on published list prices for an equivalent workload, including the data-transfer charges that competing services meter separately. Your numbers will differ — try the calculator or ask us for a modelled quote against your actual bill.
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We don't resell bandwidth
Data transfer to and from the public internet is not metered and not billed, at any volume. On most platforms this single line is the largest one on the invoice.
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You stop paying for headroom you're not using
Capacity follows demand within seconds and is billed per started hour, so a quiet weekend shows up as a smaller bill instead of provisioned capacity you already paid for.
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There's no cluster fee
Just a per-cluster floor of 1 MiB/s in and 1 MiB/s out — about $50 a month — and everything above that is metered on what you actually use.
Pricing model
Four ways the invoice gets smaller
Not a discount — a pricing model built without the line items that usually inflate a streaming bill.
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Metered on compressed bytes
Data in and data out are measured after compression — the bytes actually on the wire, not the raw size of your records. For typical JSON or Avro that's commonly 3–5× less than uncompressed volume.
Storage is metered the same way
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No public internet fee
Sending and reading data over the internet is never charged for separately, at any volume. Growth in traffic doesn't turn into growth in unit cost.
Typically the biggest saving
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Billed per started hour
No annual commitment, no reserved capacity to buy up front. Run a cluster for a day and it costs a day — set a hard spend cap per cluster if you want a hard ceiling.
No annual contract required
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Storage sized to what you keep
$20 per terabyte retained, priced from your retention window rather than quoted as a flat plan. Unlimited retention at the same rate — change it any time.
No separate storage tier to adopt
Reliability & performance
Cheap is only worth it if it stays up
The savings mean nothing if the platform wobbles under load. These are the numbers we sign up to, with credits attached when we miss them.
- 99.99%Uptime SLAUnder 4.4 minutes a month, with service credits
- ZeroMaintenance windowsUpgrades and scaling with no downtime for you
- 11 9sData durabilityEvery write on durable, verified storage
- <60 sCapacity changesScale up for a peak, down the same evening
FAQ
Common questions about cutting costs
Why don't you charge for data transfer?
Public internet traffic is $0, at any volume, always. We price on three things instead: data in, data out and storage — see the full rate card.
Is this actually cheaper than what we're paying now?
Usually, if bandwidth or over-provisioned capacity is a meaningful share of your current bill — for many teams it's the largest line on the invoice. The comparison above is illustrative; your numbers will differ. Model your own workload, or send us your current bill and we'll model the same workload on ntail.
Are there setup or migration fees?
No. Billing starts once you're moving data, per started hour, with no annual commitment. We run the migration with you at no cost.
What's the minimum I'd pay?
$50 a month per cluster, about 7 ¢ an hour, covering a floor of 1 MiB/s in and 1 MiB/s out. There's no separate cluster fee on top of it.
Stop paying to move your own data
Contact us for a quote in minutes, or send us last month's streaming invoice and we'll model the same workload on ntail — line by line, no obligation.