KafDesk for teams — shared Kafka connections and seats

The Team plan is $99 per seat per year. It adds three things to everything in Personal.

Seats

Whoever buys Team becomes the billing admin. In the Polar customer portal they assign a seat to a teammate's email; the teammate accepts the invitation and finds their own KAFDESK-… key in the portal, for up to 3 of their devices. The buyer gets no key of their own: to use KafDesk yourself, assign a seat to your own email. Seats can be revoked and given to someone else at any time; add or remove seats to change what you pay. A teammate without a key asks the admin for a seat.

Shared team connections

Keep your clusters in one JSON file in a shared folder, a git checkout or at an https URL, and point KafDesk at it in Settings → Team connections. Everyone sees the same connections with a Team badge; they are read-only in the app, and a production flag set in the file cannot be turned off locally. KafDesk re-reads the file every 15 minutes and keeps the last good copy when the source is offline.

The file never contains passwords or tokens — KafDesk refuses a file that does. Each person enters their own credentials once, and they stay in their system keychain. Export for team… (in Settings or on a connection) writes your connections in this format without any secret. Anyone can make an editable personal copy with Duplicate as personal.

{
  "version": 1,
  "profiles": [
    {
      "id": "prod-eu",
      "name": "Production EU",
      "group": "platform",
      "bootstrap": ["kafka-1.prod.example.com:9093", "kafka-2.prod.example.com:9093"],
      "protection": "on",
      "tls": { "enabled": true },
      "sasl": { "mechanism": "SCRAM-SHA-512", "username": "alice" },
      "registry": { "url": "https://schema-registry.prod.example.com" },
      "connect": { "url": "https://connect.prod.example.com", "username": "ops" }
    }
  ]
}

Rules: version is 1; every profile needs a unique id (letters, digits, ., _, -), a name and bootstrap servers; unknown fields are rejected; at most 500 profiles and 1 MB. URLs must be https and are fetched without credentials. Team connections are available during the trial and with a Team key.

Managed key deployment

To install KafDesk for people without asking each of them to paste a key, provide the key on the machine. On first start without an active key, KafDesk activates it (the usual 3-device limit applies):

• the environment variable KAFDESK_LICENSE_KEY, or
• a file with the key on its first line: /Library/Application Support/KafDesk/license.key on macOS, %ProgramData%\KafDesk\license.key on Windows, /etc/kafdesk/license.key on Linux.

The key is never written to logs. Lines starting with # in the file are ignored.

Support

Team customers get priority email support at [email protected].