For organizations using Apache Kafka, manual schema management presents significant hidden costs and risks, escalating as deployments scale. These include compatibility failures between producers and consumers, data inconsistencies due to uncontrolled schema evolution, and increased compliance exposure from decentralized schema governance. Manual processes, such as DIY schema management, often lead to wasted engineering time, operational overhead, and inflated total cost of ownership (TCO) due to reprocessing and debugging efforts. Centralizing and automating schema management with tools like Confluent Schema Registry can alleviate these issues by ensuring compatibility, preventing schema drift, and providing robust governance and audit controls, ultimately reducing operational costs and enhancing data reliability. By offering proactive compatibility checks and centralized schema governance, Confluent Schema Registry helps organizations optimize performance and compliance, thus lowering Kafka's TCO compared to manual or fragmented approaches.