Understanding the pricing model
MotherDuck Pricing Model
MotherDuck is a serverless data warehouse. Naturally, we believe in hassle-free, fair, and efficient pricing. 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. More details can be found in the pricing table.
- Paid users can use the Lite or Business Plan and incur Compute and Storage costs based on usage.
- Alternatively, you can opt for the Free Plan to access a limited amount of Compute (10 CU hours / month) and Storage (10 GB).
Compute Pricing
A Compute Unit (CU) in MotherDuck is defined as a measure of CPU and memory usage over time.
Depending on the Instance Type, MotherDuck meters compute on demand or per-instance.
Pulse instance is an on-demand, auto-scaling instance that is metered on a per-query basis. Pulse has a minimum of 1 Compute Unit (CU) second per query.
Standard and Jumbo instances are metered per second an instance is running, with variable compute costs based on the pricing plan and selected Instance Type. Instances start quickly, usually within 200 milliseconds, and continue running for 60 seconds once the last query completes. Changing Instance Types can take up to two minutes to take effect.
Storage Pricing
MotherDuck charges you for storing data in its managed storage system, in GB-month, metered per-day (see note below). Under the hood, MotherDuck leverages DuckDB's compression algorithms to reduce the storage footprint and optimize for performance.
MotherDuck provides data recoverability. In order to provide this functionality, data is kept around as a "fail-safe" for 7 days, and is billed during that period.
Shares do not incur additional data storage as it is a “zero-copy operation.” Similarly, 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. That is to say, only unique bytes are billed.
As a reminder, MotherDuck does not charge you for:
- Data managed by you in your own object storage bucket.
- Data on your laptop.
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.
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.
AI Function Pricing
MotherDuck's AI functions are priced on a per-unit-consumed basis (AI Units) depending on which functionality is invoked: 1 AI Unit = $1.00.
Fixit & SQL Assistance features (200 calls per day) are included in the free plan.
Paid plans, provide expanded access to AI features on a per-unit-consumed basis:
| Baseline AI Features | Price | # of Calls |
|---|---|---|
| FixIt | FREE | per call |
| SQL Assistant Functions: Text-to-SQL, Explain SQL, etc. | 1 AI Unit | 60 calls |
| Advanced AI Functions | Price | # of Tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt - OpenAI GPT-4o-mini Input | 1 AI Unit | 2,000,000 tokens |
| Prompt - OpenAI GPT-4o-mini Output | 1 AI Unit | 500,000 tokens |
| Prompt - OpenAI GPT-4o Input | 1 AI Unit | 120,000 tokens |
| Prompt - OpenAI GPT-4o Output | 1 AI Unit | 30,000 tokens |
| Embedding - OpenAI text-embedding-3-small | 1 AI Unit | 15,000,000 tokens |
| Embedding - OpenAI text-embedding-3-large | 1 AI Unit | 3,000,000 tokens |
Advanced AI Functions have a default usage limit of 15 AI Units per day. This limit can be adjusted upon request to support@motherduck.com.
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.
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.
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 their 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.