Understanding the pricing model

MotherDuck Pricing Model

MotherDuck is a serverless data warehouse. Naturally, we believe in hassle-free, fair, and efficient pricing.

We provide two paid plans and one free plan:

1. The Free Plan

If you're a casual user, such as a student or a hobbyist, we suggest you to start with our Free Plan.

Features: The Free Plan gives you access to

• A limited amount of Compute (10 CU hours / month)
• A limit to the amount of data you can store in MotherDuck (10 GB)
• A limit of 5 users you can invite to your organization
• One Duckling type, the Pulse - our smallest, yet very efficient compute instance

2. Lite Plan

The Lite plan is for hobbyist and small organizations. This plan is a pay-as-you-go offering.

• Compute is charged at on a per-second usage-basis dependent on the instance chosen.
• Storage is charged at $0.08 per GB per month.
• Access monthly platform fee of $25 per month.
• Access to two Duckling types: the Pulse and the Standard.
• A limit of 5 users you can invite to your organization.

Incur Compute and Storage costs based on usage.

More details can be found on our official website's pricing table.

3. Business Plan

This is the plan that is most loved and used by our customers. This plan is a pay-as-you-go offering.

• Compute is charged at on a per-second usage-basis dependent on the instance chosen.
• Storage is charged at $0.08 per GB per month.
• Access monthly platform fee of $100 per month.
• Access to all three Duckling types: the Pulse, the Standard, and the Jumbo.
• No limits to the number of users that you can invite in your organization.

More details can be found on our official website's pricing table.

Compute Pricing

A Compute Unit (CU) in MotherDuck is defined as a measure of CPU and memory usage over time. A Duckling in MotherDuck is a compute instance. Each Duckling have a cooldown period, which is the amount of time the Duckling will remain active after completing the last query. This time is intended to keep the instance warm in case of follow-up queries, especially queries that might benefit of our intelligent storage and caching mechanism.

Depending on the Duckling Type, MotherDuck meters compute per second or per resources used across time.

• Pulse

  • This is an auto-scaling Duckling, metered based on variable resource consumption over query-time.
  • It has a cooldown period of 1 second for billing.
  • Optimized for short queries and high-concurrency scenarios. Learn more about Pulse instance use cases and optimizations.
  • As an example, if you run a query that takes 3 seconds to return results, you will be billed as follows:
    • 100 ms for startup time (average startup time in)
    • 3 seconds of query running time
    • 1 second of cooldown period
    • Total billed: 4.1 seconds

• Standard

  • This is a fixed-spec Duckling, metered on a per-second basis.
  • It has a cooldown period of 60 seconds for billing.
  • Our versatile workhorse instance for general data warehouse workloads. Learn more about Standard instance use cases and optimizations.
  • As an example, if you run 5 queries that each take 30 seconds to return results, you will be billed as follows:
    • 100 ms for startup time (average startup time in)
    • 30 seconds * 5 queries = 150 seconds of total query running time
    • 60 second of cooldown period
    • Total billed: 210 seconds

• Jumbo

  • This is our largest fixed-spec Duckling, metered on a per-second basis.
  • It has a cooldown period of 60 seconds for billing.
  • Designed for the most demanding, large-scale data warehouse workloads. Learn more about Jumbo instance use cases and optimizations.
  • As an example, if you run 2 queries that each take 8 minutes to return results, you will be billed as follows:
    • 100 ms for startup time (average startup time in)
    • 8 minutes * 2 queries = 16 minutes of total query running time
    • 60 second of cooldown period
    • Total billed: 17 minutes or 1020 seconds

Note: Changing Duckling type in the UI or via our REST API can take up to two minutes to take effect.

Storage Pricing

Under the hood, MotherDuck leverages DuckDB's compression algorithms to reduce the storage footprint and optimize for performance. MotherDuck charges you for storing data in its managed storage system and computes this using GBs per month, metered per-day (using the GB-day unit of measure). The GB rate is 0.08 per GB / month. For example, if your bill for December is of 20.000 GB-days, the final bill will be computed as follows:

• 20.000 (GB-days) * 0.08 (price per GB-month) / 31 (number of days in that month) = $51,6129

What counts towards my storage bill?

• Alongside the storage service, MotherDuck provides data recoverability. To provide this functionality, we bill for every bytes, inserted, modified or deleted over the past 7 days.

What does not count towards my storage bill?

• Shares do not incur additional data storage as they are a zero-copy operation.
• Using the CREATE DATABASE X FROM DATABASE Y command is also a zero-copy operation, and only incremental changes made to the new database are added to storage.
• Any data managed by you in your own object storage bucket (e.g. S3, Blob, GCS) and that you can use to process data.
• Data on your laptop accessed via the duckdb -ui, even when signed into MotherDuck.

What changes can I make to optimize my storage bill?

The right approach to optimize storage usage in MotherDuck varies by use case and implementation. MotherDuck support can share guidance on how to optimize your storage effectively. Please reach out to us at support@motherduck.com for additional guidance.

AI Function Pricing

MotherDuck enhances your analytical capabilities with integrated AI functions. These functions leverage powerful large language models (LLMs), fine-tuned to assist with SQL tasks and unlock new OLAP use cases. AI functions are categorized and priced as follows:

• SQL Assistant Functions: metered per call, with some features being free.
• Advanced AI Functions: metered per token consumed for both input and output, priced in AI Units (1 AI Unit = $1.00).

SQL Assistant Functions

These features, including FixIt and Text-to-SQL, help you write, understand, and correct SQL queries.

For the Free plan, we include a maximum of 200 calls per day for FixIt & SQL Assistance features.

SQL Assistant Functions	Price	Unit
FixIt	FREE	per call
SQL Assistant (Text-to-SQL, Explain SQL, etc.)	1 AI Unit	for 60 calls

Advanced AI Functions

These functions provide access to powerful generative AI models for tasks like embedding generation and complex prompting. They are metered based on token usage, with costs calculated in AI Units (1 AI Unit = $1.00).

note

For Lite and Business plans, we set a default soft limit on Advanced AI Function consumption of 15 AI Units per day. This limit is for cost control and can be increased or removed by contacting support@motherduck.com.

Embedding Models

Embedding Model Name	Price	Tokens per AI Unit
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small	1 AI Unit	15,000,000 tokens
OpenAI text-embedding-3-large	1 AI Unit	3,000,000 tokens

Generative Prompt Models

Provider	Model Name	Price	Input Tokens (per AI Unit)	Output Tokens (per AI Unit)	Blended Tokens (per AI Unit)
OpenAI	GPT-4.1	1 AI Unit	150,000	37,500	93,750
OpenAI	GPT-4.1-mini	1 AI Unit	750,000	187,500	468,750
OpenAI	GPT-4.1-nano	1 AI Unit	3,000,000	750,000	1,875,000
OpenAI	GPT-4o	1 AI Unit	120,000	30,000	75,000
OpenAI	GPT-4o-mini	1 AI Unit	2,000,000	500,000	1,250,000

Incentive Programs

Free Trial

You should not have to pay anything to see if MotherDuck fits your needs. To that end, when you sign up for MotherDuck and create an organization, you are granted a 21-day Free Trial. You are not required to enter a credit card. Learn how to manage your plan after the trial.

At any point during your Free Trial you may choose to setup billing and become a paid customer. You may also elect to become a Free Plan customer at the end of the Free Trial. This process is detailed in Managing Your Bill.

Free Plan

You may choose to become a Free Plan customer. This decision is made at the organization level. Free Plan customers are not required to set up billing.

An organization on a Free Plan is allocated:

• 10 Gigabytes of MotherDuck Storage per month.
• 10 Compute Unit-hours of Compute per month.

You can only have a maximum of 5 users in a single Free Plan organization.

If the amount of data you keep in MotherDuck Storage exceeds the Free Plan limit, you lose the ability to query data in MotherDuck Storage. Only DROP and DELETE SQL commands are permitted until the overage is resolved.

You may choose to resolve your Free Plan overage by upgrading to Paid Plan. You can do this in the MotherDuck Web UI by navigating to 'Settings' -> 'Plans'.

Startup Program

Qualifying startups get 50% off an annual contract on our Business Plan, in addition to the 21-day trial. No feature gating, and no hidden fees. Apply by filling out this short form.