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> I like Kafka but can’t see how Confluent can be profitable. I've seen what some corporate customers pay for an enterprise license. It's kind of insane.

tiew9Vii 5y ago
Yes it is yet they have massive losses. The money is also likely in the same ballpark of Cloudera / Horntonworks and other companies providing professional services for open source software who have all struggled to make the business model work.
runako 5y ago
SaaS S-1s often have a section about this. From Confluent's: "As of March 31, 2021, we had 561 customers with $100,000 or greater in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, across a wide range of industries, compared to 374 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 50%. As of March 31, 2021, we had 60 customers with $1.0 million or greater in ARR, compared to 33 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 82%."
claytonjy 5y ago
We considered confluent at my last job, where our throughput was going to be miniscule to start but we required VPC peering...that bumped us into an Enterprise plan for something like 80k/year! Went with Aiven instead which was more like 20k/yr IIRC.
- kelp 5y ago
  The trouble is if you need VPC peering then it requires a dedicated VPC, dedicated k8s, dedicated instances. Confluent currently only offers one instance size, so that dedicated offering can't be scaled down. PrivateLink allows for shared VPC and hypothetically a shared k8s. So the cost structure can be better on the Confluent side. Of course scaling down instance types would make a huge difference, but I don't think that's supported currently. The cheaper option is multi-tenant Kafka clusters. In general, I think VPC peering is a dead end for use cases where you are connecting two companies networks together. It's not great operationally and puts a lot of security / filtering burden on each party. PrivateLink is a much better option.
  - claytonjy 5y ago
    I'm not too knowledgeable about all this, I'm sure you're right, and it was someone else's requirement that we have peering. Still, we'd grown accustomed to other vendors offering it by default (Timescale Cloud, Aiven) so it was a serious sticker shock and a big part of making us go elsewhere.
specialp 5y ago
Their consulting when we asked was on the order of $6000 per consultant per day. And they were fully booked.

tiew9Vii 5y ago

Yes it is yet they have massive losses. The money is also likely in the same ballpark of Cloudera / Horntonworks and other companies providing professional services for open source software who have all struggled to make the business model work.

runako 5y ago

SaaS S-1s often have a section about this. From Confluent's: "As of March 31, 2021, we had 561 customers with $100,000 or greater in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, across a wide range of industries, compared to 374 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 50%. As of March 31, 2021, we had 60 customers with $1.0 million or greater in ARR, compared to 33 such customers as of March 31, 2020, representing year-over-year growth of 82%."

claytonjy 5y ago

We considered confluent at my last job, where our throughput was going to be miniscule to start but we required VPC peering...that bumped us into an Enterprise plan for something like 80k/year! Went with Aiven instead which was more like 20k/yr IIRC.

kelp 5y ago
The trouble is if you need VPC peering then it requires a dedicated VPC, dedicated k8s, dedicated instances. Confluent currently only offers one instance size, so that dedicated offering can't be scaled down. PrivateLink allows for shared VPC and hypothetically a shared k8s. So the cost structure can be better on the Confluent side. Of course scaling down instance types would make a huge difference, but I don't think that's supported currently. The cheaper option is multi-tenant Kafka clusters. In general, I think VPC peering is a dead end for use cases where you are connecting two companies networks together. It's not great operationally and puts a lot of security / filtering burden on each party. PrivateLink is a much better option.
- claytonjy 5y ago
  I'm not too knowledgeable about all this, I'm sure you're right, and it was someone else's requirement that we have peering. Still, we'd grown accustomed to other vendors offering it by default (Timescale Cloud, Aiven) so it was a serious sticker shock and a big part of making us go elsewhere.

specialp 5y ago

Their consulting when we asked was on the order of $6000 per consultant per day. And they were fully booked.