A faster, simpler alternative to Google BigQuery

Google BigQuery is powerful, but its pricing model gets in the way. On-demand pricing means costs spike with query volume. Flat-rate slots require committing to capacity that often sits unused. Cold start latency on less-frequently-accessed tables slows down the interactive experiences your users expect.

MotherDuck takes a different approach. It’s built on DuckDB, a columnar analytical engine designed for modern hardware. It runs vectorized queries on single-node compute, processing terabytes of data without distributed coordination overhead. Most analytical queries return in under a second.

Instead of choosing between on-demand and flat-rate, MotherDuck bills by the second with serverless compute that scales to zero when idle. No capacity to reserve, no slots to provision, no surprise bills from a runaway query.

With Hypertenancy, each user or customer gets their own isolated DuckDB compute node (a duckling), sized independently. If you’re building customer-facing analytics, this matters — every user gets consistent, low-latency performance instead of competing for shared resources.

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  Sub-second analytical queries, no cold start delays or slot contention
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  Per-second billing with no on-demand vs. flat-rate tradeoff
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  Per-user isolated compute for embedded analytics
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  Standard SQL that works with your existing tools, notebooks, and pipelines
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  Scales to zero when idle — pay nothing when nobody’s querying

Start a free trial and see what analytics looks like without distributed compute overhead.

Compute instances include a short cooldown period to stay warm for follow-up queries. See pricing details for specifics.