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Pricing

Cluster types​

Confluent Cloud offers these Kafka cluster types:

  • Basic clusters - Used for experimentation, early development and basic use cases.
  • Standard clusters - Used for production-ready features and functionality.
  • Enterprise clusters - Used for production-ready functionality that requires private networking capabilities.
  • Dedicated clusters - Used for critical production workloads with high traffic or private networking requirements.
  • Freight clusters - Used for high-throughput, relaxed latency workloads that are less expensive than self-managed open source Kafka.

Kafka Cluster Types in Confluent Cloud | Confluent Documentation

Confluent’s Offerings | Apache Kafka 101 (2025 Edition) - YouTube

Confluent's Offerings

Confluent Cloud Clusters

Pricing​

Confluent Cloud​

  • Basic - Starting at $0/Month
  • Standard - Starting at ~$385/Month
  • Enterprise - Starting at ~$895/Month
  • Freight - Starting at ~$2,300/Month
  • Dedicated - Custom Pricing

Confluent Pricing–Save on Kafka Costs | Confluent

Connectors​

CategoryTaskData Transfer
Standard$0.017 - $0.30/hour$0.025/GB
Standard (CDC V2)Contact us$0.025/GB
PremiumContact us$0.025/GB
Custom$0.10 - $0.20/hour$0.025/GB

FAQs​

What are Elastic CKUs (eCKUs) and why are they important?​

Elastic Confluent Units for Kafka (eCKUs) are a unit of horizontal scalability in Confluent Cloud. eCKUs autoscale up to meet spikes in demand and back down based on workload with no user intervention required, and you only pay for the resources you use when you actually need them. Never worry about cluster sizing and provisioning or overpaying for resources again. Autoscaling eCKUs provide a truly serverless experience to save you time and money, enabling you to focus on innovation and business logic while simultaneously lowering costs.

How is my monthly bill calculated?​

Confluent monthly bills are based upon resource consumption, i.e., you are only charged for the resources you use when you actually use them:

  • Stream: Kafka clusters are billed for eCKUs/CKUs ($/hour), networking ($/GB), and storage ($/GB-hour).
  • Connect: Use of connectors is billed based on throughput ($/GB), and a task base price ($/task/hour).
  • Process: Use of stream processing with Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink is calculated based on CFUs ($/minute).
  • Govern: Use of Stream Governance is billed based on environment ($/hour).

Confluent storage and throughput is calculated in binary gigabytes (GB), where 1 GB is 2^30 bytes. This unit of measurement is also known as a gibibyte (GiB). Please also note that all prices are stated in United States Dollars unless specifically stated otherwise.

All billing computations are conducted in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).