$5k Up for Grabs: See What People Are Building with Free Tier Kafka

In the last weeks of 2025 we launched our Free Tier for Apache Kafka to give everyone a chance to get hands-on with real-time streaming without worrying about costs. And what better way to kick things off than with some friendly competition? Build something cool, share it with the community, and you could win $5k.

If you’d like to try your hand at building something cool with Free Tier but don’t know where to start, why not check out some of the submissions so far below for inspiration. You still have until January 31st to participate.

Get Inspired

Here’s a collection of some of my favourite entries so far to spark some ideas.

IoT Smart Doorbell

This project from Daniel DeBurgo combines two of my favourite things: Raspberry Pis and Apache Kafka, creating a smart doorbell that gives unique compliments to passers-by. In my opinion, all the best projects start with “what if I built this silly thing?” because having a clear goal like that always takes you to interesting places for learning.

Observability With OTEL

It’s never been easier to scale your OpenTelemetry observability with some help from Apache Kafka, as Arunvel Arunachalam neatly demonstrates in this example. I particularly like the nod to a certain Kafka powered bird feeder project, but unfortunately for Arunvel, I don’t get a vote on the winner.

Kafka-Powered Logistics

We had two brilliant entries covering logistics use cases.

Kuba Nowakowski was the first to submit an entry, and with a slick video demo to boot, showcasing how Kafka and Flink can generate parcel delivery notifications.

If you prefer your logistics with an AI flavour, check out an AI-Powered logistics solution for under $5 a month using Kafka, LangChain, and OpenAI from my colleague Muralia Basani, which deep dives into the chatbot and insights system he built using an event-driven architecture powered by Free Tier Kafka.

Blast From The Past: Kafka IRC

Anyone familiar with Ben Gamble’s past projects will already know he likes to build cool things just to show that he can, so it should come as no surprise that Ben’s project is a modernised Internet Relay Chat (IRC) built with Kafka, Postgres, and Valkey. Checkout his GitHub repo for the full project here.

Website Click Analysis

Kafka is a key element of many real-time analytics solutions, as demonstrated by this model architecture from Arun C, which neatly illustrates the benefits of Kafka for this application.

Personal Reminder Engine

I’m a big fan of personal projects where people build things that are genuinely useful for them, so this reminder app from Velmurugan Manoharan is a perfect example. I particularly like how he highlighted that Kafka can serve as a decoupling layer between third-party applications as well as between your own services.

Submit Your Own Project

Feeling inspired? Show us what you can build and submit your project by January 31st.

Good luck and happy building!