Confluent had great stuff but their prices were crazy. When we got a quote from them, it was 20x more than what we could run on our own. We got quoted something like ~500k/year and my math on running it on AWS came around 25k for the same sized cluster via Strimzi operator on dedicated K8s nodes. We could hire a dedicated 3 person team to manage the cluster for the same price lol.
Now AWS is eating Confluent's lunch with it's managed Kafka. AWS MSK is still a little rough like all AWS services but it's still cheaper and a no-brainer if you are already on AWS.
I have similar stories, I showed the Confluent consultants a projection of their Kafka quote vs Kinesis and it was like 10x, even they were confused. The ingress/egress costs are insane. I think they just do very deep discounts to certain customers. The product is good but if you pay full ticket it probably doesn't make sense.
Strimzi is really great, creating a Debezium Change Data Capture system and seeing all topics and users as Kubernetes CRDs is just ordered and magic.
The only downside is that Redpanda isn't yet supported in Strimzi, but when I met them at KubeCon last month they mentioned the possibility it might be supported in future :)
Now AWS is eating Confluent's lunch with it's managed Kafka. AWS MSK is still a little rough like all AWS services but it's still cheaper and a no-brainer if you are already on AWS.