Understanding the pricing model
MotherDuck Pricing Model
MotherDuck is a serverless data warehouse. Naturally, we believe in hassle-free, fair, and efficient pricing. We want you to be able to run production workloads for as little as $25 per month, and we want you to pay only for what you consume. If you're a casual user, such as a student or a hobbyist, we hope that our Free Plan is enough to meet your needs.
| Available plans | 30-Day Trial Try MotherDuck for free for 30 days. | Free Plan $0 per organization / month | Standard Plan $25 per organization / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it includes | |||
| Members | ✓Unlimited | ✓5 members | ✓Unlimited |
| Compute | ✓Unlimited | ✓10 CU hrs / mo | ✓100 CU hrs / mo |
| Storage | ✓ Unlimited | ✓10GB | ✓100 GB |
| Additional usage | |||
| Compute Cost per Compute Unit (CU) per hour after included plan limit is reached | ✓Unlimited | ✗ None | ✓$0.25 / CU hr |
| Storage Storage cost after included plan limit is reached | ✓Unlimited | ✗ None | ✓$0.08 / GB / mo |
| Features | |||
| Secrets | ✓Unlimited | ✓Unlimited | ✓Unlimited |
| Shares | ✓Unlimited | ✓Unlimited | ✓Unlimited |
| Access Tokens | ✓Unlimited | ✓Unlimited | ✓Unlimited |
| SQL Assistant | ✓Unlimited | ✓200 requests / day | ✓Unlimited * |
| Embedding, Prompt | ✓40 CU hrs / day | ✗ None | ✓40 CU hrs / day |
| * consumes compute | |||
All paid users start in the Standard Plan and incur additional Compute and Storage costs based on usage.
Alternatively, you can be on the Free Plan, with your Compute and Storage limited to what's granted for free.
Compute Pricing
A Compute Unit (CU) in MotherDuck is a measure of CPU.
You incur costs when running SQL queries in MotherDuck. MotherDuck charges you for the actual compute cycles required to execute your queries and nothing more. MotherDuck automatically scales your serverless personal compute data warehouses to maximize performance, and there is nothing to configure or start up. Depending on the size and complexity of your queries, any query might utilizing as few as a single Compute Unit or as many as many dozens of Compute Units at a time.
MotherDuck measures your compute utilization every second, and your usage is aggregated into Compute Unit-hours. Every query incurs a minimum of a single Compute Unit-second.
MotherDuck's Compute Pricing is radically efficient:
- We strive to use your local resources for data processing (such as many queries used for the Column Explorer feature in the MotherDuck UI). We are not charging for usage of these resources.
- There is no per-minute billing minimum. You truly pay per-second.
- You are not paying for unused resources if your data warehouse is overprovisioned or underutilized.
- You are not paying for the time it takes for your data warehouse to auto-pause.
- Sometimes queries are blocked on non-CPU resources, such as network throughput or disk IO. You are not paying for waiting for these resources to open up.
Storage Pricing
MotherDuck charges you for storing data in its managed storage system, metered per-day. Under the hood, MotherDuck leverages DuckDB's compression algorithms to reduce the storage footprint and optimize for performance.
MotherDuck charges you for 7 days' worth of fail-safe data, in order to provide data recoverability. In other words, any data that's mutated or deleted will be kept for 7 days. We will be releasing additional time travel features in coming months.
MotherDuck does not charge you for:
- Data managed by you in your own object storage bucket.
- Data on your laptop.
- MotherDuck-managed data in service of zero-copy clone, branching, and sharing features.
We meter storage in terms of calendar-days, defined as calendar-month * 12 / 365. This means that the same amount of storage will cost more in a 31-day month than in a 30-day month.
Standard Plan
All paying customers are billed monthly for the Standard Plan, $25 per organization per month.
The Standard Plan includes 100 Gigabytes of storage per month and 100 Compute Unit-hours per month, a $33 value. You pay for any additional Storage and Compute usage.
The $25 per month fee is per Organization, not per user. You can have as many users in an Organization as you'd like.
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 30-day Free Trial. You are not required to enter a credit card.
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.
All MotherDuck customers who created their accounts prior to May 1st will have the opportunity to start their 30 day Free Trials by logging on to the MotherDuck Web UI.
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.
Compute for the Free Plan is refilled continuously at a rate of ~0.013856 core-seconds per second, which is 20 core-minutes per day, and stops accruing once 20 core-minutes have been accrued. In practice, this means that all queries on the Free Plan should make forward progress rather than fail, albeit potentially slowly.
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
Eligible startups qualify for $10,000 in free MotherDuck credits, in addition to the 30-day trial. Apply by filling out this short form.