Moderate to move
MSK on DigitalOcean: what it becomes and what it costs.
On DigitalOcean, MSK becomes Redpanda on DigitalOcean Droplets, or a DigitalOcean managed database. Same protocol. On Hetzner you run it yourself; where the destination sells the managed engine (DigitalOcean, OVHcloud and Scaleway for most of them) it costs roughly twice the bare server, still well under today's price.
Effort grade
Moderate
Same software, self-hosted: you patch, back up and fix it
Cost after the move, before engineer time
30% of today
kafka.m5.large is $0.21/h = $153/mo per broker plus storage; a CCX13 dedicated-vCPU server is €43 ≈ $50 and three of them carry a typical three-broker cluster, about 30%.
Engineer time
6 h a month
To run the replacement: patching, backups, on-call. Plus about 5 engineer days for the move itself.
Other ways to replace it
The report lets you pick any of these per service; the figure and the grade follow.
Redpanda Cloud or Confluent Cloud (BYOC)
Kafka protocol, run by the vendor on servers you rent: no brokers to own, but most of today's price stays.
90% of today · Easy
NATS JetStream on DigitalOcean Droplets
Lighter than Kafka and far cheaper to run, but producers and consumers are rewritten against a different API.
20% of today · Hard
In three modelled AWS accounts
What MSK costs in the modelled accounts and what the estimator makes of it on DigitalOcean, with the default assumptions. Not customer data.
| Account | AWS /mo | DO /mo | Change | Priced by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scale-up on Kubernetes$24,950/mo in total | $1,500 | $450 | −$1,050 | ratio |
| Data-heavy platform$79,640/mo in total | $3,200 | $960 | −$2,240 | ratio |
Your own MSK line, from your export
Drop one month of your AWS cost export and the report prices every service, MSK included, on DigitalOcean list prices of 18 Oct 2026, net of the engineer time to run it. In your browser; nothing is uploaded.