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February 2025 Pricing Update for MotherDuck Trials

Feedback from our customers has been instrumental in shaping our development of MotherDuck as a platform, and we’re excited you’re giving MotherDuck a try!

We’ve been hearing from customers that our current pricing model–based on each query’s Compute Unit seconds–has given some teams trouble in estimating their monthly costs. Before a query is run, determining “How much CPU is this query going to use?” is understandably tough to build an intuition around.

In response, we’ve developed new compute and pricing options that can give data teams better predictability in their spending as they grow. And for cases where our existing pay per query pricing model is the right fit, that option remains available.

While this update will affect some workload costs, we're committed to ensuring a smooth transition.

What’s Changing

New Plan Options:

MotherDuck now has two platform plans to choose from, Lite and Business, alongside our Free Plan. We’ll dive into detail on the differences below, but here’s an overview.

The Free Plan is designed for hobbyists and experimenters with small-scale analytics needs, like hobby projects. Key components of the Free Plan include:

  • No monthly cost
  • Access is limited to Pulse compute instances
  • Up to 10 Compute Unit Hours per month
  • Up to 10 GB storage
  • Up to 5 organization members
  • Limited Access to AI Functions
  • Access to MotherDuck Community Support via Slack

The Lite Plan is most useful for small team use cases and individuals. Maybe your small team is building out some early analytics, or your hobby project is growing into something more. Key components of the Lite Plan include:

  • $25/month Platform Access
  • Access to Standard compute instances in addition to Pulse instances. Standard instances provide expanded compute resources over Pulse. More on compute instances in the next section
  • Up to 5 organization members
  • Access to AI Functions
  • Full access to MotherDuck experts for support, with a response SLA

The Business Plan is ideal for businesses with complex needs, and larger teams. Some key components of the Business Plan include:

  • $100/month Platform Access
  • Access to Jumbo compute instances in addition to Standard and Pulse instances. Jumbo instances provide further expanded compute resources over both Standard and Pulse. More on compute instances in the next section
  • Unlimited organization members
  • Access to Read Scaling, enabling highly concurrent read-heavy workloads like business intelligence and data apps to automatically scale out with multiple compute instances
  • Access to AI Functions
  • Faster access to MotherDuck experts for support, with a priority response SLA
  • Full SOC 2 Type II and GDPR reports, HIPAA BAA available on request
Pricing Grid

Read more about the new MotherDuck plan options on our updated pricing page.

Compute:

Pay Per Instance: We’re adding new choices for MotherDuck compute, with Pay Per Instance Standard and Jumbo instances.

  • The Pay Per Instance model is based on uptime, which provides more predictable costs you can compare to other data warehouse products.
  • The Standard instance is great for everyday tasks and balanced performance.
  • The Jumbo instance is useful for heavy workflows like batch ETL pipelines or complex transformations.
  • When you run a query, your instance spins up within milliseconds.
  • You pay for the seconds that the instance is running, with a minimum of one minute.

Pay Per Query: Our existing instances are now called Pulse.

  • These instances are capped in size, however they are billed on our existing Pay Per Query model, metered for billing on Compute Unit seconds.
  • The Pulse instance enables lightweight, fully serverless analytics.
  • This can be very useful for applications where you have data partitioned by user, ad-hoc query execution, or incremental data processing with smaller data sizes.
Instance Grid

Compute Instance Types are assigned per-user, so each user can select the size they need. Review details in the MotherDuck instance types documentation.

Platform Access:

  • MotherDuck base platform access is $25/month for the Lite Plan, and $100/month for the Business Plan
  • Platform access price is no longer inclusive of compute, storage, or other usage

Storage:

  • Storage remains at the current $0.08 / GB, for both plans

Read more about storage billing in the MotherDuck storage pricing documentation.

Read Scaling:

  • Users can select an independent compute instance type for read scaling vs. read-write, allowing you to right-size the compute resources and metering model for each use case
  • Read Scaling compute instances will be available only on the Business Plan

Support:

  • Human-first support from MotherDuck experts is now available directly within the MotherDuck Web UI. Head to the “Help” menu to ask a question or report an issue, and our team will respond promptly via email.
  • Standard support is included on the Lite plan, with a response SLA.
  • Priority support is included with the Business plan, with an expedited response SLA.