Understanding the pricing model
MotherDuck Pricing Model
MotherDuck is a serverless cloud data warehouse. We believe in providing our users with simple, straightforward pricing.
MotherDuck offers two paid self-serve plans: Lite and Business.
MotherDuck is currently available on AWS in two regions, US East (N. Virginia) - us-east-1 and Europe (Frankfurt) - eu-central-1. Each MotherDuck Organization is currently scoped to a single cloud region that must be chosen at Org creation when signing up.
Plan Comparison
| Feature | Lite | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Individual users, small projects | Teams and organizations | Bespoke deployments: Contact us |
| Platform fee | $0/month | $250/month | Custom |
| Compute included | Includes 10 CU hours / month + Pay-as-you-go for additional usage | Pay-as-you-go for additional usage | Custom |
| Duckling sizes | Pulse only | Pulse, Standard, Jumbo, Mega, Giga | Pulse, Standard, Jumbo, Mega, Giga |
| Read Scaling | - | Yes | Yes |
| Storage included | Includes 10 GB / month + Pay-as-you-go for additional usage | Pay-as-you-go for additional usage | Custom |
| Users | 3 active users / 2 service accounts | 10 active users / unlimited service accounts | Custom |
| SLA | - | 99.9% Availability | 99.9% Availability |
| Backup | 1 day (paid feature) | - Point-in-time Restore - up to 90 day backups | Custom |
| Observability | - | Query history | Query history |
Users are defined as human users with a login via email + password, Google, GitHub, or SSO *(coming soon!), while Service Accounts are defined as non-human accounts designed for programmatic access and automation workflows (e.g., backend services, integrations, or customer-facing analytics).
Compute Pricing
A Compute Unit (CU) in MotherDuck is defined as a measure of CPU and memory usage over time. A Duckling in MotherDuck is a compute instance. Each Duckling has a cooldown period, which is the amount of time the Duckling will remain active after completing the last query. This keeps the Duckling warm for follow-up queries that may benefit from MotherDuck's intelligent storage and caching.
Duckling Sizes
| Duckling | Billing | Cooldown | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pulse | Per CU (resources consumed), not wall-clock time | 1 second | Small, bursty queries; read-heavy workloads; frontend scenarios. For compute-heavy queries, consider Standard instead. Billing example: 2s low CPU + 1s cooldown = 3 CU seconds; 100 small writes × 2 CUs + 1s cooldown = 201 CU seconds. |
| Standard | Per second | 60 seconds | General purpose data warehouse workloads. Billing example: 5 queries × 30s + 100ms startup + 60s cooldown = 210 seconds. |
| Jumbo | Per second | 60 seconds | Large-scale data warehouse workloads. Billing example: 2 queries × 8min + 100ms startup + 60s cooldown = 17 minutes. |
| Mega | Per second | 5 minutes | Demanding jobs and large-scale workloads. Billing example: 2 queries × 8min + few min startup + 5min cooldown = ~21 minutes. |
| Giga | Per second | 10 minutes | Batch jobs; overnight/weekend processing. Billing example: 2 queries × 5min + few min startup + 10min cooldown = ~20 minutes. |
For long-running, compute-heavy queries, consider using a Standard or even larger Duckling instead of a Pulse. Pulse Ducklings may consume high volumes of CUs when scaling up for intensive, bursty workloads
Changing your Duckling size to Pulse, Standard, or Jumbo via the UI or REST API may take up to 2 minutes. Switching to a Mega takes up to 5 minutes, while switching to a Giga takes up to 10 minutes.
Compute
Business Plan
| AWS Region | Pulse | Standard | Jumbo | Mega | Giga |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
US East (N. Virginia) - us-east-1 | $0.60 per hour | $2.40 per hour | $4.80 per hour | $12.00 per hour | $36.00 per hour |
Europe (Frankfurt) - eu-central-1 | $0.73 per hour | $2.93 per hour | $5.86 per hour | $14.65 per hour | $43.95 per hour |
Lite Plan
| AWS Region | Pulse |
|---|---|
US East (N. Virginia) - us-east-1 | $0.60 per hour |
Europe (Frankfurt) - eu-central-1 | $0.73 per hour |
Lite plan includes 10 CU hours on Pulse per month. Additional usage is billed at the rates above.
Storage Pricing
Under the hood, MotherDuck uses DuckDB's compression algorithms to reduce the storage footprint and optimize performance. MotherDuck charges for data stored in its managed storage system based on your average storage usage over the billing period. Your monthly bill is calculated as the average of your daily storage (in GB) multiplied by the per-GB rate.
For example, if your MotherDuck Organization is in us-east-1 and your average storage over December is 650 GB, the final bill will be computed as follows:
- 650 GB × $0.04/GB = $26.00
What counts towards my storage bill?
- Standard databases: MotherDuck provides point-in-time restore by retaining historical data as
historical_bytesfor organizations on paid plans. - Transient databases: Databases can be set as
TRANSIENTat database creation. Transient databases are billed for active data stored and a 1-day failsafe minimum. Data is not retained as failsafe bytes beyond this minimum, which is ideal for temporary or easily reproducible datasets like intermediate job outputs. - NOTE: By default, for both Standard and Transient databases, new databases retain 1 day of historical data on Lite (paid) and 7 days of historical data on Business - Business plan users are able to configure their
historical_bytesretention window from 0 to 90 days. Users are billed for active data plus historical, retained, and failsafe bytes. Refer to the Storage Lifecycle for more details.
What does not count towards my storage bill?
- Shares do not incur additional data storage as they are a zero-copy operation.
- Using the CREATE DATABASE X FROM DATABASE Y command is also a zero-copy operation. Only incremental changes made to the new database are added to storage as
active_bytes, while active Shares that point to a deleted databases will retainkept_for_cloned_bytes. - Any data managed by you in your own object storage bucket (e.g. S3, Blob, GCS) and that you can use to process data.
- Data on your laptop accessed via the
duckdb -ui, even when signed into MotherDuck.
What changes can I make to optimize my storage bill?
The right approach to optimize storage usage in MotherDuck varies by use case and implementation. Please reach out to us at support@motherduck.com for additional guidance on how to optimize your storage effectively for your needs.
Storage Rates
| AWS Region | Cost per GB/month |
|---|---|
US East (N. Virginia) - us-east-1 | $0.04 / GB |
Europe (Frankfurt) - eu-central-1 | $0.043 / GB |
Storage is billed based on your average usage over the billing period.
Lite plan includes 10 GB of free storage. Additional storage is billed at the rates above.
AI Function Pricing
MotherDuck enhances your analytical capabilities with integrated AI functions. These functions leverage powerful large language models (LLMs), fine-tuned to assist with SQL tasks and unlock new OLAP use cases.
AI functions are categorized and priced as follows:
- SQL Assistant Functions: metered per call, with some free features.
- Advanced AI Functions: metered per token consumed for both input and output, priced in AI Units (1 AI Unit = $1.00).
SQL Assistant Functions
These features, including FixIt and Text-to-SQL, help you write, understand, and correct SQL queries.
SQL Assistant features are included with both Lite and Business plans.
| SQL Assistant Functions | Price | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| FixIt | FREE | per call |
| SQL Assistant (Text-to-SQL, Explain SQL, etc.) | 1 AI Unit | for 60 calls |
Advanced AI Functions
These functions provide access to powerful generative AI models for tasks like embedding generation and complex prompting. They are metered based on token usage, with costs calculated in AI Units (1 AI Unit = $1.00).
For Lite and Business plans, there is a default soft limit on Advanced AI Function consumption of 10 AI Units per day to help control costs. This limit can be increased or removed by contacting support@motherduck.com.
Embedding Models
| Embedding Model Name | Price | Tokens per AI Unit |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI text-embedding-3-small | 1 AI Unit | 15,000,000 tokens |
| OpenAI text-embedding-3-large | 1 AI Unit | 3,000,000 tokens |
Generative Prompt Models
| Provider | Model Name | Price | Input Tokens (per AI Unit) | Output Tokens (per AI Unit) | Blended Tokens (per AI Unit) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | GPT-5 | 1 AI Unit | 240,000 | 30,000 | 100,000 |
| OpenAI | GPT-5-mini | 1 AI Unit | 1,200,000 | 150,000 | 500,000 |
| OpenAI | GPT-5-nano | 1 AI Unit | 6,000,000 | 750,000 | 2,500,000 |
| OpenAI | GPT-4.1 | 1 AI Unit | 150,000 | 37,500 | 93,750 |
| OpenAI | GPT-4.1-mini | 1 AI Unit | 750,000 | 187,500 | 468,750 |
| OpenAI | GPT-4.1-nano | 1 AI Unit | 3,000,000 | 750,000 | 1,875,000 |
| OpenAI | GPT-4o | 1 AI Unit | 120,000 | 30,000 | 75,000 |
| OpenAI | GPT-4o-mini | 1 AI Unit | 2,000,000 | 500,000 | 1,250,000 |
Incentive Programs:
Free Trial
New users who sign up for MotherDuck and create an organization automatically get access to a 21-day Free Trial without entering a credit card. Learn how to manage your plan after the trial has ended.
At any point during your Free Trial, you may choose to set up billing and select a plan. At the end of your trial, you can continue with the Lite plan (no credit card required) or upgrade to Business for additional features. Learn more about managing your bill.