[ryanworl]

[WarpStream co-founder here]

What do you think would be a good limit for the free plan?

This isn't actually an architectural constraint for us. We just didn't want to promise unlimited usage forever so we picked a somewhat arbitrary number to start with.

[morelisp]

I'm probably the wrong person to ask, sorry! My interest is purely academic, both for data governance and technical reasons I'll probably never be able to use this. I also don't mean to imply they're unfair, free is free - just that it explains why things which are pretty cheap in Kafka proper trigger billing (vs. of course things that are expensive in Kafka now being really cheap).

I do think a lot of people using Kafka compaction topics as their source-of-truth are defaulting to 256-~1000 partitions, if you want to entice them I'd probably offer at least 1024. (But I suspect your target market is not using these - rather they're salivating over the possibility of the automatic format transcoding you mentioned in another comment...)