Understanding the pricing model

note

MotherDuck will remain free to all users until June 1st, 2024.

Preparing For Billing

On June 1st, 2024, MotherDuck will start charging for incurred costs.

To better prepare you for paying for MotherDuck, we're releasing details of our pricing model. Additionally, we're metering your usage and we're giving you billing-related features ahead of time. All usage will be discounted at 100% on your April and May invoices.

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

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 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 any time travel and related features.
• MotherDuck-managed data in service of zero-copy clone, branching, and sharing features.

note

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.

note

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 elect what happens once the Free Trial ends:

• You may choose to set up billing and become a paid customer.
• You may choose to become a Free Plan customer.

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.

If you consume more than the Free Plan limit in a calendar month, you will no longer be able to issue additional queries that month.

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.