We challenged the community to build something cool with our Free Apache Kafka offering for a chance to win $5k, here’s some of the awesome submissions so far!
Hugh Evans
|RSS FeedDeveloper advocate and community manager with a particular interest in data and AI.
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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.
Here’s a collection of some of my favourite entries so far to spark some ideas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Feeling inspired? Show us what you can build and submit your project by January 31st.
Good luck and happy building!
