[vood]

Rolling your own generally has mainly downsides in the context they are in. 1. This is clearly a small team with very little spend 2. Tomorrow someone leaves and next engineer will have to manage all of this. 3. I don't think they realize that they actually increased cost of this service not decreased it. Now they need to manage their own Kafka monthly. Engineering time is expensive.

[TZubiri]

Yes, rolling your own X has downsides and it has upsides.

Welcome to tradeoff engineering.