As someone who works with Confluent Kafka I'm not happy with there pricing structure. While the cost savings look good I'd need a much larger Confluent bill to consider moving off Confluent. The cost savings appears to be about the cost of a developer. With complex systems using many micro services to communicate with Kafka the switching cost is not worth it at a small scale given the business values developers could provide instead of doing the switch. When your talking about much larger data volumes or multiple clusters across multiple regions then the math starts to look better.