Pricing - Coming in early 2024!

At MotherDuck we believe that most users don’t have huge amounts of data, and truly only query a small portion of that data. For you analytics should not cost a wing and a leg.

Cold Storage

$0.04 per GB per month

Used for persisting your data in MotherDuck

Hot Storage

$0.02 per GB per hour

Used for running your queries

MotherDuck pricing philosophy:

  • Only pay for what you consume
  • Easy to understand, easy to predict, easy to manage
  • No runaway bills

Details

  • You only pay for what you consume
  • You only pay for storage used - hot storage and cold storage
    • Cold storage is used to persist your data in MotherDuck
    • Hot storage is used to execute your queries
  • About hot storage
    • You set a maximum hot storage limit to fine-tune your workloads precisely for your needs and to protect against runaway bills
    • Your hot storage is instantly autoscaled up to the limit you set and back down to zero, only charging you for the hot storage you used
  • Both cold and hot storage are metered per second, down to a single Gigabyte
  • Only cloud usage is metered
    • MotherDuck can use local resources (e.g. your laptop) to aid in query processing
    • Anything that’s done locally is free - it is neither billed nor metered!
  • Upcoming: a generous perpetual free tier
  • We expect you to be able to do meaningful work for ~$20/month for realistic-sized workloads, even if you run heavy amounts of queries

Frequently Asked Questions

What is “hot storage” ?

  • Hot storage represents a unit of resource capacity utilized for query processing, analogous to memory
  • In short, the more hot storage you have, the faster your queries run

How can I determine how much “hot storage” I need?

  • You can first eyeball it by looking at the size of your dataset. Because analytical queries often query the most recent data, and rarely more than a small number of columns, you need enough “hot storage” for a fraction of your dataset. Thus taking 10% of your dataset size is a good starting point.
  • Thereafter, you can experiment with your workload. If you’d like faster performance, increase the “hot storage” maximum. Conversely, if you want to spend less, decrease the maximum.
  • We will also provide you with information about how much “hot storage” was used in query history tables.

How can I determine how much “cold storage” I need?

  • This storage size should be close to the amount of storage needed on disk or in object storage.
  • We will also provide you with storage information in a system table at a latter date.