Precisely this! I might even add a section in the docs, “Not a replacement for Kafka,” under the FAQ.

Where Kafka starts to fall short is routing. If you want to access the data of one user from user-events-topic, that’s expensive to do. Most other streaming technologies are built around the same design, such as Kinesis.

There are other implementations that support the Kafka wire protocol and are cheaper in exchange for latency, e.g., AutoMQ and WarpStream.

That said, I’ll release Disk/EBS-staged WAL soon enough: https://github.com/PicoMQ/picomq/issues/13 as an add-on to cover low-latency needs.