# Cloudflare K2

10 Hacker News commenters recommended Cloudflare K2 and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend K2 as a cheap, serverless, Kafka-compatible event stream for long retention; critics are reluctant to build on a non-standard platform and call the per-GB price steep.

## Why people recommend it

- Low cost for long retention (3 comments): "Having a cost efficient fully serverless Kafka compatible service would be great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49925504)) "The primary benefit of K2 is cost, particularly for longer retention periods." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923798)) "Making the individual stream really cheap and easy is a big simplification" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49924645))
- Serverless Kafka-compatible option (2 comments): "Having a cost efficient fully serverless Kafka compatible service would be great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49925504)) "Redpanda users coming across this would definitely find this helpful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937440))
- Object storage-based design appeals (2 comments): "merging them together through object storage is a highly appealing package" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49925360)) "we have a big leg up on folks building on top of S3" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49923867))

## What people warn about

- Reluctant to build on non-standard (1 comments): "I'm always reluctant to build on anything that isn't a portable industry standard." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49924023))
- Per-GB price called steep (1 comments): "Data Consumed being at the same $0.04/GB is rather steep" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49928973))
- Questionable use on its own (1 comments): "IMO using K2 on its own doesn't make sense" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926387))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Amazon SQS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-sqs.md): 18 recommend
- [Cloudflare Queues](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-queues.md): 7 recommend
- [Amazon Kinesis](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-kinesis.md): 6 recommend
- [Google Cloud Pub/Sub](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-cloud-pub-sub.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Cloudflare K2", https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-k2/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).