Apache Pulsar pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
Apache Pulsar is completely free and open source under the Apache License 2.0. There are no license fees, no per-node charges, and no usage caps baked into the software itself. You download it, deploy it, and run it without paying Apache a dime. That said, "free software" is never truly free at scale. Your real costs come from the infrastructure to run Pulsar clusters (brokers, BookKeeper nodes, ZooKeeper/metadata stores), the engineering talent to operate them, and the cloud compute and storage bills that accumulate as throughput grows. For teams that want a managed experience, vendors like StreamNative offer hosted Pulsar with usage-based or annual contract pricing, but those rates require contacting sales directly. We think Pulsar delivers outstanding value for organizations with the in-house expertise to self-host, but the operational overhead is real and should be budgeted honestly.
Plan Comparison
Since Apache Pulsar is an open-source project, it does not have traditional SaaS-style pricing tiers. Instead, the cost structure depends on your deployment model. We break it into three practical tiers based on how organizations actually adopt Pulsar.