On this page
Key findings
Support prices that are published fall into two shapes. A floor or a percentage of what you spend: Aiven charges the greater of $500, $2,500 or $10,000 a month or 10% of monthly charges depending on plan; Confluent Cloud charges the greater of $29 a month or 5% (Business) and the greater of $1,000 a month or a tapering 10% to 3% (Premier). Because the floor decides the bill for small estates, a team with $5,000 of monthly charges pays anywhere from $250 (Confluent Business) to $10,000 (Aiven Premium) a month for support. A price per machine: Canonical lists Ubuntu Pro support at $1,775 per server per year (infrastructure) or $3,400 (full, 24/7).
Everything else we checked is either a hosted price that includes support (CloudAMQP, Confluent Cloud, Redis Cloud) or no price at all (OpenLogic, Percona, Canonical's Kafka page). For the specialist, self-managed RabbitMQ, Kafka and Redis support that most enterprises buy, the published number is usually missing. Independent Kafka support generally runs about $24,000 to $72,000 a year, a range we publish on our Kafka page.
Open source support cost: what you pay when the license fee is zero
Open source software has no license fee, so the cost of an open source project shows up elsewhere: the engineers who run it, the infrastructure underneath, and the support you buy when community support is not enough. Community support (forums, mailing lists, GitHub issues) is free and carries no response time. Commercial support is the paid layer: a named support team, a response-time commitment, often security patches and security fixes for versions the maintainer no longer patches, and help with upgrades.
For RabbitMQ the paid layer comes with the Tanzu RabbitMQ commercial edition or as support for the Community Edition. For Kafka and Redis it comes from vendors and specialists as support packages or support services. Self-hosted support covers software you run yourself, on your own servers or on Kubernetes; a paid cloud version bundles the operations into the price. The total cost of an open source platform is the sum of all of these, so a license fee comparison on its own misleads, and so does a support price without a scope.
Enterprise open source pricing differs from software pricing in one more way: you hold the source code, so you can fix and customize it yourself. That control is the reason many teams choose an open source project in the first place, and the reason support is priced on response time, scope and risk instead of on seats or features. When you compare enterprise support pricing, compare the workflow behind the price: who answers, how fast, on which versions, and what happens when the maintainer has moved on.
Support priced as a formula
Three vendors publish what support itself costs. Two use the same structure, a monthly floor against a percentage of what you spend with them, and one prices by machine. The annual floor column is our arithmetic: the monthly floor multiplied by twelve.
| Vendor and plan | Published price | Annual floor (our arithmetic) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aiven Essential | Greater of $500 or 10% of all monthly charges | $6,000 | aiven.io/support-services |
| Aiven Advanced | Greater of $2,500 or 10% of all monthly charges | $30,000 | aiven.io/support-services |
| Aiven Premium | Greater of $10,000 or 10% of all monthly charges, or a tiered schedule: 10% of the first $150K, 7% from $150K to $500K, 5% from $500K to $1M, 3% over $1M (not for multi-organisation setups) | $120,000 | aiven.io/support-services |
| Confluent Cloud Business | Greater of $29 a month or 5% of monthly usage | $348 | confluent.io/confluent-cloud/support/ |
| Confluent Cloud Premier | Greater of $1,000 a month or 10% of the first $50,000 of usage, 8% of the next $50,000, 6% of the next $900,000, 3% over $1M a month | $12,000 | confluent.io/confluent-cloud/support/ |
| Canonical Ubuntu Pro, infrastructure support | $1,775 per server per year, 24/7 (weekday price is 50% less) | $1,775 per server | ubuntu.com/pricing/pro |
| Canonical Ubuntu Pro, full support | $3,400 per server per year, 24/7 (weekday price is 50% less); adds break-fix support for the Ubuntu Universe repository | $3,400 per server | ubuntu.com/pricing/pro |
What the formulas cost at three spend levels
A floor-or-percentage formula behaves like a flat fee for small estates and like a percentage for large ones. The table applies each published formula to a month with $5,000, $30,000 and $200,000 of vendor charges. These are our calculations from the formulas above, not quoted prices, and they use the flat 10% for Aiven (Aiven's own examples do the same). Premier's tiers are applied as written.
| Plan | $5,000 a month of charges | $30,000 a month | $200,000 a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aiven Essential | $500 (10%) | $3,000 (10%) | $20,000 (10%) |
| Aiven Advanced | $2,500 (50%) | $3,000 (10%) | $20,000 (10%) |
| Confluent Cloud Business | $250 (5%) | $1,500 (5%) | $10,000 (5%) |
| Confluent Cloud Premier | $1,000 (20%) | $3,000 (10%) | $15,000 (7.5%) |
Hosted and managed list prices
These are prices for the service itself, not for support, and support is bundled in. They are the closest published numbers to a managed RabbitMQ, Kafka or Redis bill. Per-year figures are our arithmetic (monthly price times twelve, or hourly price times 8,760 hours). Amazon MSK's rate comes from the worked examples on AWS's pricing page for US East (N. Virginia) and covers broker instances only, not storage or data transfer.
| Service | Published price | Per year (our arithmetic) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| CloudAMQP RabbitMQ, smallest dedicated plan (Sassy Squirrel, 1 node) | $50 a month | $600 | cloudamqp.com/plans.html |
| CloudAMQP RabbitMQ, largest 1-node plan (Raging Rhino) | $5,499 a month | $65,988 | cloudamqp.com/plans.html |
| CloudAMQP RabbitMQ, Loud Lion | $3,499 a month (1 node), $10,497 (3 nodes), $17,495 (5 nodes) | $41,988 / $125,964 / $209,940 | cloudamqp.com/plans.html |
| Confluent Cloud Standard cluster | Starting at about $385 a month | About $4,620 | confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/ |
| Confluent Cloud Enterprise cluster | Starting at about $895 a month | About $10,740 | confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/ |
| Amazon MSK broker, kafka.m7g.large | $0.204 per broker-hour (US East) | $1,787 per broker | aws.amazon.com/msk/pricing/ |
| Amazon MSK broker, kafka.m5.large | $0.21 per broker-hour (US East) | $1,840 per broker | aws.amazon.com/msk/pricing/ |
| Redis Cloud Essentials | From $0.007 an hour, $5 a month total; the plan lists basic support only | $60 | redis.io/pricing/ |
| Redis Cloud Pro | From $0.014 an hour, minimum $200 a month | $2,400 minimum | redis.io/pricing/ |
What vendors do not publish
For the paid, self-managed support that most enterprises actually buy, three vendors we checked publish no price on the page that sells it. Instaclustr publishes a configurator rather than a list: prices per node appear only after you pick a cloud, region and node size, and anything else goes to sales.
| Vendor | What the page shows | Source |
|---|---|---|
| OpenLogic (Perforce) | A pricing page headed Request Pricing, with a quote form for support, long-term support and services | openlogic.com/pricing |
| Percona | Support and services overview with no price | percona.com/services/support |
| Canonical, managed Kafka | Subscription description (security maintenance, 24/7 support, managed deployments) with a contact link and no price | canonical.com/data/kafka |
| Instaclustr (NetApp) | A node-level price configurator by cloud, region and node size; special cases go to sales | instaclustr.com/pricing/ |
How to read open source support pricing
- Work out the floor first. A percentage-of-spend plan is a flat fee until your spend passes the floor divided by the rate: $5,000 a month for Aiven Essential, $25,000 for Advanced, $100,000 for the flat-10% reading of Premium.
- Compare like with like. A percentage of a vendor's own hosted bill buys support for that vendor's service; it does not cover a cluster you run yourself.
- For self-managed RabbitMQ, Kafka or Redis, expect a quote. The scope drivers are the technology, the number of clusters or nodes, the response-time commitment, and whether you want proactive monitoring or a managed service.
- Ask each vendor for the response-time commitment next to the price. A support price without a response time is not comparable.
If you want a quote on your own estate, tell us the technology, cluster count and response requirement, or start from the support page for your platform: RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis.
Method and limits
Each page in the source column was fetched on 26 October 2026 and the figures read from it. We included a price only if the vendor states it as a price or a formula on its own page. Annual figures, the spend examples and the per-broker-hour conversions are our arithmetic and are labelled. We did not use third-party price lists, forum posts or reported quotes.
Limits: nine vendors were checked, so this is a sample of what is published, not of the market. Hosted list prices are not support prices, and regions, commitments and discounts change them. Amazon MSK's figure is one region and one broker size taken from AWS's own worked examples. Confluent shows its cluster prices as starting-at figures with a tilde. Vendors change these pages without notice, so each row carries the date it was read. AceMQ prices are quote-only and are not included. We will re-read every row at 28 and 90 days.
Frequently asked questions
How much does open source support cost in 2026?
It depends on the shape of the contract. Where vendors publish prices, support is a floor or a share of spend (Aiven from $500 a month, Confluent Cloud from $29 a month) or a price per server (Canonical, $1,775 to $3,400 per server per year). Specialist support for a self-managed cluster is usually quoted, and independent Kafka support generally runs about $24,000 to $72,000 a year.
How much does RabbitMQ support cost?
No dedicated RabbitMQ support vendor in this sample publishes a price. The nearest published numbers are hosted: CloudAMQP's dedicated RabbitMQ plans run from $50 a month for one small node to $3,499 a month for one Loud Lion node, with support included. Self-managed RabbitMQ support from specialists is quoted by scope.
How much does Kafka support cost?
Confluent Cloud publishes support as the greater of $29 a month or 5% of usage (Business) and the greater of $1,000 a month or a tapering 10% to 3% (Premier). Aiven's support plans start at $500 a month. For a self-managed cluster, independent Kafka support generally runs about $24,000 to $72,000 a year.
How much does Redis support cost?
Redis publishes hosted prices, not self-managed support prices: Redis Cloud Essentials starts at $0.007 an hour ($5 a month total) with basic support, and Redis Cloud Pro starts at $0.014 an hour with a $200 a month minimum. Support for self-managed Redis or Valkey is quoted.
Why do most vendors not publish support prices?
Support scope varies by technology, cluster count, response time and stage of service, so a single list price misleads. Where vendors do publish, they tie the price to spend or to machines.
Is paying for open source support worth the cost?
It depends on what an outage costs you and how many engineers you can spare. Community support is free but has no response time, while commercial support adds a named team, a response commitment and often security fixes for versions the maintainer no longer patches. Compare the support price against the cost of one serious incident and the engineer time you would otherwise spend.