Amazon MSK pricing calculator
Provisioned, Serverless, Connect & Replicator. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon MSK pricing works
What you pay for
- Provisioned: broker instance hours (Standard or Express brokers), storage per GB-month, optional provisioned throughput and tiered storage.
- Serverless: $0.75 per cluster-hour, partition-hours, $0.10/GB in and $0.05/GB out, storage.
- MSK Connect per MCU-hour; private connectivity; cross-AZ replication traffic between brokers is not charged.
Common cost traps
- Brokers bill 24/7 and a production cluster needs at least 3 (one per AZ).
- Storage is provisioned per broker and cannot be reduced once increased.
- Client traffic crossing AZs is billed as EC2 cross-AZ transfer.
Ways to reduce cost
- Use Graviton (m7g) brokers and tiered storage for long retention.
- Use MSK Serverless for small or spiky clusters.
- Configure rack-aware clients to read from the local AZ replica.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. No MSK Free Tier. New-plan accounts can pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon MSK?
MSK provisioned broker hours (Standard and Express), storage, provisioned throughput, tiered storage, private connectivity, MSK Serverless and MSK Connect are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $619.40 | 16.1 mo. | 40.4 mo. | 161.4 mo. |
| Medium | $753.96 | 13.3 mo. | 33.2 mo. | 132.6 mo. |
| Large | $6,192.28 | 1.6 mo. | 4.0 mo. | 16.1 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
MSK Serverless cluster 24/7, 20 partitions, 200 GB in, 400 GB out, 100 GB stored | Cluster-hours: 730 hours x $0.75 = $547.50; Partition-hours: 14,600 hours x $0.0015 = $21.90; Data in: 200 GB x $0.1 = $20.00; Data out: 400 GB x $0.05 = $20.00; Storage: 100 GB-month x $0.1 = $10.00 | Total ~$619.40/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
3 x kafka.m7g.large brokers 24/7, 1 TB storage per broker | Broker hours m7g.large: 2,190 broker-hours x $0.204 = $446.76; Storage: 3,072 GB-month x $0.1 = $307.20 | Total ~$753.96/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
6 x kafka.m7g.2xlarge brokers 24/7, 4 TB each, 2 MSK Connect workers (2 MCU) | Broker hours m7g.2xlarge: 4,380 broker-hours x $0.816 = $3,574.08; Storage: 24,576 GB-month x $0.1 = $2,457.60; MSK Connect MCUs: 1,460 MCU-hours x $0.11 = $160.60 | Total ~$6,192.28/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon MSK pricing FAQ
How much does a minimal MSK cluster cost?
Three kafka.m7g.large brokers are about $447/month in us-east-1 before storage.
Is replication traffic billed?
AWS does not charge for data replicated between brokers in a cluster; client traffic across AZs is billed.
Serverless or provisioned?
Serverless avoids broker sizing but has a fixed cluster-hour fee plus per-GB charges; provisioned is cheaper at sustained throughput.
Do credits cover MSK?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card msk (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/msk/pricing/ before publishing.