MotherDuck pricing 2026: plans and costs
How AI answers describe MotherDuck pricing
Several data warehouses offer transparent, publicly available pricing, but MotherDuck, Google BigQuery, and ClickHouse Cloud stand out.
Compared to: BigQuery · Amazon Redshift · ClickHouse
- MotherDuck — a cloud service built around DuckDB with a free plan, useful when you want DuckDB’s simplicity with team/cloud access.
- MotherDuck: public compute-time pricing with a one-second billing minimum, making costs easier to estimate for intermittent workloads.
Quick pricing summary
- Lite: $0 per org / month
- Business: $250 per org / month + usage
- Enterprise: Custom (custom)
- Worth noting: Plans are priced in USD. Compute is billed per second on Standard through Giga instances and per CU hour for Pulse. Storage is metered on compressed data at $0.04 per GB per month. Enterprise is contact sales. Annual plans are available through sales with no discount stated.
Plans
Lite
$0 per org / month
- Up to 3 internal active users and 2 service accounts
- 10 GB free storage
- 10 hrs Pulse compute per month included
- Pulse instances only
- Role-based access control (preset roles)
- Community support
Business
$250 per org / month + usage
- Up to 10 internal active users and unlimited service accounts
- 5 instance types and read-scaling replicas
- Flights agent-native data pipelines
- 90-day snapshot retention
- Query history
- Role-based access control (preset and custom roles)
- Support from MotherDuck experts
- 99.9% availability SLA
Enterprise
Custom custom
- Unlimited internal active users and service accounts
- Fixed-cost capacity pricing
- AWS PrivateLink connectivity
- IP allowlisting
- HIPAA BAA
- Bring Your Own Compute (BYOC), available on request
What you get on each plan
| Feature | Lite | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internal users | Up to 3 active users | Up to 10 active users | Unlimited |
| Service accounts | Up to 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Snapshot retention | Up to 1 day | Up to 90 days | Up to 90 days |
| Availability SLA | Not stated | 99.9% | Custom |
| Read-scaling replicas | Not stated | Up to 16 read-scaling replicas | Up to 16 read-scaling replicas |
| Single Sign-On (SAML & OIDC) | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated |
Hidden costs & add-ons
| Cost driver | Price | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $0.04 per GB / month | All plans; Enterprise custom |
| Pulse compute | $0.60 per CU hour metered per query | Lite, Business; Enterprise custom |
| Standard compute | $2.40 per hour billed per second | Lite, Business; Enterprise custom |
| Jumbo compute | $4.80 per hour billed per second | Lite, Business; Enterprise custom |
| Mega compute | $12.00 per hour billed per second | Lite, Business; Enterprise custom |
| Giga compute | $24.00 per hour billed per second | Lite, Business; Enterprise custom |
| Flight F4 | $0.15 per hour billed per second | Lite (30 minutes per day free without credit card); Business; Enterprise custom |
| Flight F16 | $0.60 per hour billed per second | Lite with credit card; Business; Enterprise custom |
| Flight F32 | $1.20 per hour billed per second | Lite, Business; Enterprise custom |
| AI Units | $1.00 per AI Unit | Advanced AI functions; Lite and Business have a soft limit of 10 AI Units per day |
MotherDuck pricing vs alternatives
| Brand | Entry price | Free plan | Model | Best for | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MotherDuck | Free; paid from $250 / mo | Yes | Usage-based | — | |
| BigQuery | — | — | — | — | Compare → |
| Amazon Redshift | — | — | — | — | Compare → |
| ClickHouse | $0.218 / mo | No · 30-day trial | Usage-based | Developers and data teams that need real-time queries on large datasets at an affordable cost, including teams adding a speed layer on top of an existing data warehouse or OLTP database. | Compare → |
| DuckDB | — | — | — | Developers and data engineers who want a fast analytical SQL engine embedded in an application or run on a laptop, edge device or server | Compare → |
List prices as published on motherduck.com/product/pricing/. Totals are worked examples, not quotes.