Yeah really kind of surprised the free tier isn't the self hosted kind. That will keep me looking.
FWIW we’re considering a version where you can host the metadata yourself for enterprise users. For the free tier though we didn’t think it made sense since for a workload that could fit into our free tier, it didn’t seem like anyone would want to be responsible for the metadata layer themselves. Would love your feedback on that.
But I'm still excited to try this, since at least now I could play around (and learn) with a partially kafka compatible system, without the burden of maintaining all of Kafka parts (and costs). Thanks!