Serverless Kafka without the bandwidth bill

It means there is nothing to size. No brokers to count, no partitions to plan, no capacity to reserve and no cluster to resize when your traffic doubles.

You create a cluster, get an endpoint, and start sending data. Capacity follows your traffic within seconds — up for a peak, back down afterwards — and you are billed for what you actually used, not for the size of a cluster you guessed at six months ago.

Three reasons, and none of them is a loss-leading trial price.

We run our own infrastructure. Our capacity isn't rented by the hour from a hyperscaler, so there's no cloud margin baked in underneath ours.

You pay for one copy of your data, not three. Durability comes from the storage layer rather than from triplicate copies sitting on expensive fast disks — so storage is $20 a terabyte instead of three times that. A week of retention on a 10 MiB/s stream is about 6.3 TB, so $126 a month.

We don't resell bandwidth. Moving data is the single largest line on most streaming invoices. We don't charge for it at all, which alone is where most customers find the bulk of their saving.

Correct. Ingress (the data you send to ntail) and egress (the data you read back out) are not metered and not billed — whatever the volume, wherever it comes from. Most providers charge for both, and on a high-fanout stream that is frequently the largest line on the invoice.

There's no fair-use asterisk and no overage tier waiting further down the page. You're billed for data in, data out and storage. That's the entire invoice.

Compressed. We meter the compressed bytes as they arrive on the wire, not the raw size of your records — so the compression your producers already do works in your favour rather than ours.

For typical JSON or Avro payloads with a standard codec that is commonly 3–5× less than the uncompressed volume, which means the MiB/s you are billed for is usually a good deal smaller than the number your application thinks it is sending. Storage is metered the same way.

Yes. Everything is billed per started hour, so a cluster you run for a day costs a day. Storage bills on what you actually retain, and data in and out on what you actually move, invoiced monthly in arrears.

No annual commitment, no reserved capacity to buy up front and no cluster fee. The only floor is a per-cluster minimum of 1 MiB/s in and 1 MiB/s out — $50 a month, about 7 ¢ an hour. You can also set a hard spend cap per cluster, so a misbehaving job can't produce a surprise invoice.

No — ntail supports unlimited retention. Keep a topic's data for a week or for years, on the same per-TB storage rate the whole time.

There's no separate "tiered storage" product to adopt and no migration when you outgrow a retention window — just change the setting.

Production clusters carry a contractual 99.99% monthly uptime SLA — under 4.4 minutes of downtime a month — with service credits if we miss it.

Every cluster is spread across independent failure domains, and because compute holds no permanent state, a lost node is replaced in seconds rather than rebuilt over hours. Live status is always on our status page.

A single cluster sustains gigabytes per second, and capacity changes land in under a minute instead of during a maintenance window — so a launch, a backfill or a seasonal peak doesn't need a capacity plan filed a month ahead.

You never provision or request headroom: capacity follows your traffic up and back down, and every cluster ships with throughput and consumer-lag dashboards so you can see exactly what it is doing.

Yes. ntail works with the streaming clients, connectors and analytics tools your team already uses — Spark, Flink, Snowflake, Databricks, ClickHouse, Iceberg and the rest.

Switching is a connection-string change and a credential, not a rewrite. Our team runs the migration with you at no cost, and you can move one consumer at a time with a rollback at every step.

No. There's no proprietary client to adopt, no annual contract to escape, and no egress toll on the way out — which is usually the thing that makes leaving a streaming provider expensive.

Export everything you've stored whenever you want, and pay nothing for the transfer.

In the EU by default, on infrastructure we operate ourselves in Europe rather than rent from a public cloud, encrypted in transit and at rest. ntail is operated by Factual Tech AB, a Swedish company.

Data residency is contractual: EU by default, with other regions — including the US — available on request. For regulated workloads we'll run a dedicated cluster, deploy into a specific region, or run fully off the public cloud so the data never leaves the boundary you choose. See security for the full detail.