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Inkless billing

Inkless uses a usage-based billing model. You are charged for:

  • Compute, measured in Aiven Kafka Units (AKUs)
  • Storage, based on the amount of data retained in object storage
  • Data movement, based on topic ingress and egress
note

Inkless BYOC deployments continue to use the existing plans-based pricing model.

AKU-hours​

Compute charges are measured in AKU-hours.

An AKU (Aiven Kafka Unit) represents the throughput capacity of the service. The service bills based on the number of AKUs in use over time, calculated in AKU-hours. When the service scales up or down, the AKU-hour charge updates to match the current AKU level.

For details on how scaling works, see AKU plans and scaling.

Storage​

Storage charges are based on the amount of data retained in object storage.

  • Diskless topics store all retained data in object storage.
  • Classic topics keep some recent data on local disk before offloading it to object storage.

Network usage​

Network charges apply to:

  • Ingress: Data written to topics
  • Egress: Data read by consumers, connectors, or mirroring processes

Network usage is measured at the service level across all topics.

note

Only data written to and read from Kafka topics is billed. Data Kafka replicates between brokers for fault tolerance is not billed.

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