Aiven runs open-source data services (Kafka 129 , PostgreSQL 1,289 , MySQL 524 , OpenSearch, ClickHouse 29,491 , Valkey 251,210 and others) as managed services on AWS 24 , Google Cloud 1 , Azure 6 , DigitalOcean 553 and UpCloud; its API listed the smallest paid Kafka plan in 145 cloud regions. Aiven for Apache Kafka is upstream Apache Kafka (version 4.3 on the free service of Aiven's Free Kafka Plan) with Aiven's open-source add-ons around it: Karapace 637 , its Apache 2.0 schema registry and REST proxy (Apicurio Registry); managed Kafka Connect 129 , where the JDBC connector of Kafka Connect comes from; MirrorMaker 2; and the tiered-storage plug-in that Tiered Storage ran. Clients authenticate with client certificates by default, or SASL/SCRAM, and Aiven manages users and ACLs through its API and console.
Plans are fixed bundles of nodes, CPU, memory and disk, billed by the hour; networking is included within a fair-use policy on classic plans and metered otherwise. The pricing page groups them as Free, Developer ($35 a month: two nodes on DigitalOcean, 1 MB/s, 20 topics) and Professional, which the API lists as Startup, Business and Premium plans of three to thirty nodes, plus -inkless variants. Inkless is Aiven's open-source Kafka fork (github.com/aiven/inkless (https://github.com/aiven/inkless 95 )) implementing diskless topics, KIP-1150, which the Kafka project accepted in March 2026: topic data goes straight to object storage instead of broker disks (compare WarpStream, WarpStream), in limited availability on Aiven Cloud. You can also run any plan in your own cloud account (BYOC).
The Free plan (free-0) is the reason this section exists. Aiven's documentation states that free services need no credit card and have no time limit, with clear limits: one free Kafka service per organization, 250 KiB/s in and out, five topics with two partitions each, retention fixed at three days, a limited number of users and ACLs, no extra disk, no Kafka Connect, MirrorMaker 2 or tiered storage, a few DigitalOcean regions, and automatic power-off when the service sits idle (you can power it on again). That suits learning and tests, not anything customers depend on.