Understanding the pricing model
MotherDuck Pricing Model
MotherDuck is a serverless cloud data warehouse. We believe in providing our users with simple, straightforward pricing.
MotherDuck offers two paid plans, Lite and Business, and a Free Plan:
1. Free Plan
If you're a casual user, student or hobbyist, our Free Plan may be a good fit.
The Free Plan gives you access to the following features:
- A limited amount of Compute (up to 10 CU hours / month)
- A limited amount of MotherDuck-provided storage (up to 10 GB)
- One Duckling type for compute: Pulse - our smallest compute instance, optimized for efficiency
- Up to 5 users, including service accounts, can be invited to your organization
2. Lite Plan
The Lite Plan is a monthly, pay-as-you-go plan that is perfect for hobbyists and small organizations.
The Lite Plan gives you access to the following features:
- Compute is charged at a per-second usage-basis depending on the Duckling (instance) type
- Storage is charged at $0.0025685 per GB per day ($0.08 per 31-day month)
- Platform access is provided for a flat $25 per month
- Access to two Duckling types: Pulse and Standard
- Up to 5 users, including service accounts, can be invited to your organization
More details can be found in the official pricing table.
3. Business Plan
The Business plan is a monthly, pay-as-you-go plan that is the most popular choice for MotherDuck customers.
- Compute is charged at a at a per-second usage-basis depending on the Duckling (instance) type
- Storage is charged at $0.0025685 per GB per day ($0.08 per 31-day month)
- Platform access is provided for a flat $100 per month
- Access to four Duckling types: Pulse, Standard, Jumbo, and Mega - larger compute instances are available upon request
- There are no limits to the number of users, including service accounts, that can be invited to your organization
More details can be found in the official 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 has 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 that may benefit from our intelligent storage and caching mechanism.
Depending on the Duckling (Instance) Type, MotherDuck meters compute per-second or per-resource used over time.
-
- 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 cooldown period
- Total billed: 4.1 seconds
-
- 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 purpose data warehouse workloads. Learn more about Standard instance use cases and optimizations.
- As an example, if you run 5 queries consecutively that each take 30 seconds to return results, you will be billed as follows:
- 100 ms for startup time (average startup time)
- 30 seconds * 5 queries = 150 seconds of total query running time
- 60 seconds cooldown period
- Total billed: 210 seconds
-
- A larger fixed-spec Duckling, metered on a per-second basis
- It has a cooldown period of 60 seconds for billing
- Designed for faster performance on 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)
- 8 minutes * 2 queries = 16 minutes of total query running time
- 60 seconds 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.
- Mega
- A larger fixed-spec Duckling, metered on a per-second basis
- It has a cooldown period of 5 minutes for billing
- Designed for demanding jobs and data warehouse workloads with even larger scale. Learn more about Mega 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:
- ~A few minutes for startup time (average startup time)
- 8 minutes * 2 queries = 16 minutes of total query running time
- 5 minutes cooldown period
- Total billed: 21 minutes or 1260 seconds
Note: Changing Duckling type in the UI or via our REST API can take up to 5 minutes to take effect.
- Giga
- Our largest fixed-spec Duckling, metered on a per-second basis
- It has a cooldown period of 10 minutes for billing
- Designed for the largest and toughest data warehouse workloads like batch jobs that need additional capacity to run overnight or complete over the weekend. Learn more about Giga instance use cases and optimizations.
- As an example, if you run 2 queries that each take 5 minutes to return results, you will be billed as follows:
- ~A few minutes for startup time (average startup time)
- 5 minutes * 2 queries = 10 minutes of total query running time
- 10 minutes cooldown period
- Total billed: 20 minutes or 1200 seconds
To get access to Giga instances, please contact us.
Note: Changing Duckling type in the UI or via our REST API can take up to 10 minutes to take effect.
Storage Pricing
Under the hood, MotherDuck uses DuckDB's compression algorithms to reduce the storage footprint and optimize performance. MotherDuck charges for data stored in its managed storage system and computes the volume using GBs per month, metered per-day (using the GB-day unit of measure). The GB rate is 0.0025685 per GB-day. 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) * 0.0025685 (price per GB-day) = $51.37
What counts towards my storage bill?
- Alongside its storage service, MotherDuck also provides data recoverability. Every byte inserted, modified or deleted over the past 7 days is stored and billed.
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. 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. Please reach out to us at support@motherduck.com for additional guidance on how to optimize your storage effectively for your needs.
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 free features.
- 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.
In the Free plan, we include a maximum of 200 calls per day for FixIt & SQL Assistant 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).
For Lite and Business plans, there is a default soft limit on Advanced AI Function consumption of 15 AI Units per day to help control costs. This limit 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
New users who sign up for MotherDuck and create an organization automatically get access to a 21-day Free Trial without entering a credit card. Learn how to manage your plan after the trial has ended.
At any point during your Free Trial, you may choose to set up billing and become a paid customer. You may also choose the Free Plan at the end of the Free Trial. Learn more about managing Your bill.
Free Plan
At any point during a 21-day Free Trial, you may select the Free Plan for your organization. Free Plan customers are not required to set up billing or enter a credit card to use MotherDuck.
Every Free Plan organization receives access to the following each month:
- 10 Gigabytes of MotherDuck Storage
- 10 Compute Unit (CU) hours of Compute on the Pulse instance
- A maximum of 5 users, including service accounts
If the data volume stored in MotherDuck Storage exceeds the Free Plan limit of 10 GB, you will lose the ability to query data on MotherDuck Storage. Only DROP and DELETE SQL commands are permitted until the overage is resolved.
You may choose to resolve your Free Plan storage overages by navigating to 'Settings' -> 'Plans' in the MotherDuck Web UI and upgrading to one of our Paid Plans, Lite or Business.
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.