Watch the bus. Read-only Kafka message inspection and analytics: browse live topics, trap messages with CEL expressions and chart a window of traffic with DuckDB in the browser, without storing topic data. The stream, observed.
Hi Product Hunt 👋
I'm Jason Young, and I built Akema.
Why it exists: I built Akema because looking at a Kafka topic had turned into a project. A plain question — what does this message look like, when did the bad ones start, is it one producer — meant a throwaway consumer, a dump into storage, or a console that security would not put near production. Each of those leaves something behind: a script, a copy of the events, or a consumer group that commits offsets and can move someone else's place in the log.
Live traffic is not a warehouse. Akema is for the hour when you need to see what the topic is doing — debug a producer, check a schema, or walk a room through the stream — without standing up a pipeline just to look.
What it is: a live message inspector for Apache Kafka. You point it at a cluster, watch messages arrive in a table, and write one-line CEL rules ("traps") that tag the bad ones as they land. From there you can chart any field in the browser with DuckDB, or put a board on the big screen.
What it deliberately doesn't do: it's read-only. It never produces messages, commits your offsets, changes topics or ACLs, or stores payloads. Messages live in memory, and there's no telemetry. It's one binary with no JVM and no database.
Being upfront about where it stands:
- This is 1.0. Linux and Docker are the main platforms; the macOS and Windows builds are still marked beta.
- It's built for looking at a topic, not running a cluster. There's no topic admin, no consumer-lag management, and no producing test messages.
- Pricing: every download includes a 14-day trial of everything with no sign-up. After that, replaying CSV and JSON files stays free, and live Kafka is $99 per node per year. A license file works air-gapped.
No cluster handy? The free demo suite (linked from the docs) spins up Kafka in Docker with realistic traffic, so you can try it in a few minutes.
The feedback I'm after:
1. Does read-only matter to you, or would you trade it for features? Would it get Akema through change control where you work?
2. What would you look for first? Bad payloads, a schema change, a traffic spike, a single customer's messages?
3. Where did setup trip you up? Auth (SASL, mTLS), Avro or Protobuf, MSK, Confluent Cloud, Event Hubs. I'd like to know exactly where it failed.
4. Is $99 per node per year fair? If not, what would make it an easy yes?
Looking forward to your feedback.
About Akema on Product Hunt
“Read-only Kafka message inspection & analytics”
Akema launched on Product Hunt on November 3rd, 2026 and earned 67 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #33 on the daily leaderboard. Watch the bus. Read-only Kafka message inspection and analytics: browse live topics, trap messages with CEL expressions and chart a window of traffic with DuckDB in the browser, without storing topic data. The stream, observed.
On the analytics side, Akema competes within Productivity, Developer Tools and Tech — topics that collectively have 1.8M followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how Akema performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted Akema?
Akema was hunted by Jason Young. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of Akema including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Jason Young