The NEW Redpanda Serverless

Redpanda has spent years building the most efficient, Apache Kafka^®-compatible streaming data platform in the industry—designed for simplicity, scalability, and performance. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce a major update to Redpanda Cloud: the all-new Redpanda Serverless.

In data streaming, selecting the right-sized cloud service is often the most challenging part of finding the right solution for your application. When competitors offer three entirely separate products — each with different capabilities, pricing structures, and availability — it forces customers to predict their future needs upfront, choose the "right" cluster from the start, and deal with time-consuming, often complex upgrades as their needs grow to scale. 

At Redpanda, we're doing things differently. We're introducing — one product — that completely eliminates the hassle of choosing the right size. With one price, customers only pay for what they use. Plus, availability remains consistent across cloud providers and regions.

No more guessing which type of cluster you need or worrying about upgrades and migrations to get features you need. Just a simple, scalable way to stream data. Because the best technology should be easy to adopt, simple to scale, and transparent to price.

One product: A performance profile that's Enterprise-ready

Imagine you're happily running your workload on GCP and you hit one of the dreaded limits of our competitors' solutions. You need to increase your throughput and resign to paying more — only to realize it’s not supported in your current tier of service. There's no upgrade path available to support your growing workload, so you can either start over or undergo a complicated migration via MirrorMaker 2.

With the new Redpanda Serverless, we anticipated this exact scenario and have built in underlying mechanisms that allow Serverless clusters to seamlessly scale to even higher levels of performance.

In short, our new Redpanda Serverless offering delivers higher performance and scale to tackle even more demanding streaming workloads, replacing Pro and Standard tiers with a single, more powerful product with:

• 100 MB per second ingress
• 300 MB per second egress
• 5,000 partitions
• Storage: unlimited

Here's a quick look at how we stack up against the competition:

We prioritized what our customers have been asking for! More partitions and more throughput! Whether you're prototyping your next product, powering a globally distributed microservices architecture, or just trying to get out from under the operational burden of managing Kafka yourself — this is the most cost-effective way to do it.

One price: Built for cloud efficiency — and your budget

Redpanda’s breakthrough in price-performance stems from a foundational rethink of Kafka's architecture. Redpanda Serverless is built on the same high-performance core that powers mission-critical workloads for some of the world’s most data-intensive organizations. No JVM. No ZooKeeper or KRaft. No waste.

That efficiency gives Redpanda an edge, and we’re passing those savings directly on to you:

• Ingress from $0.045/GB
• Egress from $0.04/GB
• Base compute starting at just $0.10/hour

Compare that to what you'd pay with traditional cloud providers or well-known managed Kafka services, and you’ll find that Redpanda Serverless offers equal or better performance at a fraction of the cost — without hidden fees or opaque consumption models. Using the current list prices (as of March 2025), here's another quick comparison:

At Redpanda, we also provide pricing through a public pricing calculator rather than force you to sign up to find pricing within the product. Discounts are also available with an annual commitment! Just ask our sales team.

One Serverless engine: reliability and flexibility come first

99.9% uptime SLA

Imagine running your workload with a well-known managed Kafka solution, and as a default, you’re given a 99.5% uptime SLA, but you’re running a mission-critical workload. You need a minimum of 99.9% SLA. In this scenario, you get to go through a time-consuming upgrade and get ready to pay 5x more.

We understand how important an uptime SLA is to your business, even if your business is running on serverless. That’s why we include 99.9% SLA for all Serverless clusters.

Mo’ regions mo’ power

Redpanda Serverless has been available in AWS us-east-1 and eu-central-1 since its inception. We are now expanding to:

• us-west-2
• ap-south-1

Don’t see a region that you need? Get in touch with your region requirements — they might already be on our roadmap!

Price-performance takeaways

For an example workload's charges scoped down to 1 day of use — 1.185 MB per sec write, 1.185 MB per sec read, 100 partitions, 5-day retention period — we found the following*:

• 🍎 Redpanda Serverless is priced comparably to Confluent Cloud Basic
  ($15.98 vs. $14.67 per day for an equivalent workload)
• 💸 Redpanda Serverless is ~46% more cost efficient than Confluent Cloud Standard
  ($15.98 vs. $29.31 per day — while offering simpler pricing than different levels of eCKUs)
• 🔥 Redpanda Serverless is ~58% more cost efficient than Amazon MSK Serverless
  ($15.98 vs. $38.24 per day — with no Kafka Connect dependencies)
• 🧠 True serverless experience: Redpanda auto-scales with your workload. No startup lag, no provisioning, no tuning — just stream.
• 🛡️ Redpanda, MSK Serverless, and Confluent Cloud Standard all offer 99.9% SLAs, but Redpanda gives you better cost-efficiency and a simpler operational model.

* Updated March 27 to correct storage and partition calculations. Calculations use 730 hours per average month.

Learn all the ways you can get started with the new Redpanda Serverless in our docs: free trial, AWS Marketplace, or an annual commitment that can also provide bulk discounting and support.

Redpanda Connect: Built-in streaming Integrations without the complexity

Modern data pipelines don’t end at the pub/sub topic or message queue. That’s why Redpanda Serverless supports Redpanda Connect — our next-gen, cloud-native change data capture (CDC) and streaming integration framework.

Redpanda Connect is built to be simpler and more cost-efficient than legacy connector frameworks. Unlike traditional serverless streaming platforms that rely on the aging connector runtimes of Kafka Connect (MSK) or push you toward heavyweight and expensive stream processing layers like managed Flink (Confluent Cloud), Redpanda Connect was designed from the ground up for simplicity, scale, and seamless integration with your data systems.

• No connector orchestration to manage
• Transparent, usage-based billing *
• Built-in observability
• Faster time to production

You get the power of connectors without the pain of managing them.

* And yes, the free beta of Redpanda Connect on Serverless continues! Expect GA later in 2025.

Get started with Serverless

While well-known Kafka vendors tailor their solutions to fit their own implementation details, we prioritize solutions that put customer needs first. No servers to manage. No Kafka tuning to sweat. Just high-performance streaming with predictable pricing and effortless scalability. 

Learn all the ways to get started with the new Redpanda Serverless in our docs. Plus:

👉 Sign up for a free trial
🤖 Try on AWS Marketplace with $300 in credits
⚖️ Check how much you can save with our pricing calculator

The future of streaming data is here — and it’s never been this powerful, efficient, and easy to use.