Feast vs Tecton: 30-Day Latency & Cost Benchmark

#feast #tecton #featurestore #mlops

The $1,200 question: can an open-source feature store match a managed platform?

I spent 30 days running parallel feature pipelines through Feast (self-hosted on AWS) and Tecton (managed platform) to answer one question: does Tecton's price premium buy you enough speed and reliability to justify $500+/month over a DIY Feast setup?

The setup: 50,000 prediction requests/day pulling from ~100 features (user demographics, 7-day/30-day aggregates, real-time event counts). Think recommendation system or fraud detection scale. Feast ran on a t3.medium EC2 instance ($30/month) + Redis ElastiCache ($45/month). Tecton's smallest production tier starts at $500/month.

Here's what the numbers actually showed.