A Confluent Cloud 17,245 bill has three Kafka 129 meters, plus separate ones for connectors, Flink 129 , Tableflow, governance and cluster links: capacity per eCKU-hour (CKU-hour on Dedicated), data in and out per GB, and storage per GB-month, counted before replication and in binary gigabytes (GiB). Usage accrues hourly, in UTC, and a partial hour is billed as a full one.
| Type | Per eCKU-hour | Data in or out, per GB | Storage, per GB-month | Confluent 17,245 's starting estimate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | First eCKU free, then $0.14 | $0.05 | $0.08 | $0 a month |
| Standard | $0.75 | $0.035-$0.050 | $0.08 | $385 a month |
| Enterprise | $1.75-$2.25 | $0.020-$0.050 | $0.08 | $895 a month |
| Freight | $2.25 (2 eCKU minimum) | $0.014-$0.030 | $0.03 | $2,300 a month |
Ranges fall with volume, and committed annual spend, bought directly or through the AWS 24 , Google Cloud 1 or Azure 6 marketplace, earns further discounts. Two items catch newcomers. The network rate applies to every byte a client reads, so a topic read by five consumer groups pays egress five times. And managed connectors add their own per-task-hour and per-GB charges, so price the connectors with the cluster, not after it.
The free trial. A new organization receives free credit automatically at sign-up ($400 in the current offer), and the sign-up form asks for an e-mail address, not a card. The credit expires after 30 days or when spent. Then the documentation is explicit: the organization is suspended, its data becomes inaccessible, and to continue you must add a payment method: a credit card (prepaid cards are refused), a US bank account, or billing through a cloud marketplace. If none is added within 30 days of suspension, Confluent deletes the organization's clusters and data. A promotional code buys more credit but only postpones the same step. So the card requirement comes at the end of the trial rather than the start: you can learn the console on credit, but any Confluent Cloud system meant to outlive a month needs a card or a contract. Free Tiers Compared compares this with the plans that need no card at all, and Aiven's Free Kafka Plan runs BookNest on one of them.