A faster, simpler alternative to Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift was designed when distributed clusters were the only realistic way to handle large analytical workloads. That architecture carries overhead: provisioning clusters, managing nodes, running resize operations, paying for capacity that sits idle between queries.

MotherDuck takes a different approach. It runs on DuckDB — columnar, vectorized queries on single-node compute. No data shuffling across nodes, no distributed coordination. Just fast processing on modern hardware. Most queries come back in under a second, and costs drop accordingly.

There are no clusters to manage and nothing to reserve. It’s serverless, billed by the second, and scales to zero when idle. The Hypertenancy model gives each user their own isolated DuckDB compute node (called a duckling), sized independently. So you can embed low-latency, interactive analytics directly in your product without worrying about noisy neighbors.

In practice, that means:

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  Analytical queries return in under a second, no cluster provisioning involved
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  Pay-per-second billing — nothing when idle, no reserved instances
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  Isolated per-user compute for customer-facing analytics
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  Standard SQL that works with dbt and your existing pipelines
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  Zero cost at zero usage

Try it free. Run your current workload and see how it compares.

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