The Legacy SaaS Tax: A Technical Breakdown of Confluent's Cost
Traditional Architecture: Paying for Confluent's AWS Bill
On-Premise Roots
Confluent is built on a traditional on-premise Kafka architecture, failing to leverage true cloud-native S3 efficiencies.
Heavy Infrastructure Overhead
The legacy design forces you to pay for massive EC2 and EBS costs that Confluent simply passes on to you.
The AutoMQ Diskless Fix
Unlike Confluent, AutoMQ uses a Diskless architecture to offload data directly to S3, stripping away the "AWS Tax" entirely.
The Missing BYOC: Paying to Move Your Own Data
No True BYOC Support
Confluent lacks a native BYOC model, forcing your data to leave your VPC and reside in their SaaS account.
Private Link Surcharges
Bridging your account to Confluent's SaaS triggers high, recurring AWS Private Link fees for every byte transferred.
The AutoMQ BYOC Advantage
AutoMQ keeps data 100% within your VPC, eliminating the cross-account networking costs and security risks inherent to Confluent.
The Partition Tax: Confluent's Hidden Profit Engine
Charging for Metadata
Confluent bills you for every partition created, regardless of whether there is actual data throughput or traffic.
Multi-Environment Inflation
Partitions across Testing, Staging, and Production environments multiply your costs even when idle.
The 50% Bill Markup
For many customers, these arbitrary partition fees can balloon to exceed 50% of the total monthly invoice.
AutoMQ solves the "Confluent Dilemma" by combining a true BYOC model with a Diskless architecture.
100% Kafka compatibility. Run in your own VPC on any cloud. No partition fees. No vendor lock-in. No acquisition risk. Just pure, elastic, diskless Kafka at 10x lower cost with zero operational overhead.
Architected for Your Cloud, Not Their Profit Margin
| Category | AutoMQ (True BYOC) | Confluent (Legacy SaaS) |
|---|---|---|
| Platform Unity | Unified A single cluster optimized for availability, consistency, and low latency across all workloads. | Fragmented Requires separate clusters for different workloads (Kora, WarpStream, Freight). |
| Enterprise BYOC | Production-Proven Fully managed and resilient BYOC with unified control and data planes within your VPC. | Immature & Split Separate control and data planes (Confluent-managed vs. customer-managed) are less resilient. |
| Infrastructure & Performance | Light & High-Perf Designed for modern hardware; delivers superior throughput and latency on 10x less infra. | Heavy & Rigid Struggles with high throughput and latency; fewer options for cost optimization. |
| Storage Architecture | Native Diskless Built for S3 from day one; 100% direct-to-object-storage persistence. | EBS Baggage Object storage is often a bolt-on (Freight clusters still in early access). |
| The "Triple Tax" | Tax-Free Eliminates middleman markups; uses Spot Instances and S3 to kill the "AWS Tax." | Cumulative You pay Confluent Tax (Partitions), IBM Tax (Licensing), and AWS Tax (Cross-AZ). |
| Networking | Internal Efficiency All traffic stays within your VPC; zero bridge fees and zero hidden traffic costs. | External Complexity Massive bills for Private Link and inter-zone data transfer. |
| Migration Experience | Seamless Kafka Linking enables Zero-Downtime migration with full Offset Preservation. | High Friction Cluster Linking typically requires downtime for cutover; complex to preserve offsets. |
A Real-World Cost Analysis: AutoMQ vs Confluent
Scenario: 100/300 MiB/s (Write/Read) | 5,000 Partitions | 72h Retention
* Pricing based on publicly listed prices from Confluent and AutoMQ.
Why AutoMQ Costs Less
- Zero Traffic Fees: Diskless architecture eliminates cross-AZ data transfer costs entirely
- No Partition Tax: Unlike Confluent, we don't charge per partition—scale freely
- S3-Native Storage: Leverage dirt-cheap object storage instead of expensive EBS volumes
- BYOC Transparency: Pay only for actual cloud resources—no hidden SaaS markup
Smart Teams. Smart Moves.
Smart Savings.
These companies escaped the Confluent tax and moved to AutoMQ—unlocking 60-75% cost savings, instant elasticity, and complete infrastructure control.
See how they made the switch
FAQs
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