MotherDuck vs Neon Pricing (2026)

How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.

MotherDuck pricing Neon pricing
Starts at $250/mo Custom
Number of plans 3 3
Free plan
Free trial —
Pricing model hybrid usage-based

Price is one row. To weigh the features too, use our feature comparison template →

Lite

$0/mo
  • 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)
  • Guides: Shared context for better AI agent performance
  • Community support

Business

Popular
$250/mo
  • Up to 10 internal active users and unlimited service accounts
  • 5 instance types and read-scaling replicas
  • Flights: agent-native data pipelines
  • Guides: Shared context for better AI agent performance
  • 90-day snapshot retention
  • Query history
  • Role-based access control (preset and custom roles)
  • Support from MotherDuck experts
  • 99.9% availability SLA

Enterprise

Custom
  • Unlimited internal active users and service accounts
  • Fixed-cost capacity pricing
  • AWS PrivateLink connectivity
  • IP allowlisting
  • HIPAA BAA

Free

$0/mo
  • 100 projects
  • 100 CU-hrs monthly per project
  • 0.5 GB of storage per project
  • Sizes up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM)
  • Unlimited team members
  • Managed Better Auth
  • 5 GB of Object Storage
  • Functions

Launch

Popular
Custom
  • 100 projects
  • $0.106 per CU-hr
  • $0.35 per GB-month
  • Sizes up to 16 CU (64 GB RAM)
  • 3-day metrics/logs in UI
  • Managed Better Auth
  • Object Storage
  • Functions
  • AI Gateway

Scale

Custom
  • 1,000+ projects
  • $0.222 per CU-hr
  • $0.35 per GB-month
  • Sizes up to 56 CU (224 GB RAM)
  • SLAs, HIPAA, private network
  • Managed Better Auth
  • Object Storage
  • Functions
  • AI Gateway

MotherDuck vs Neon FAQ

Which one is cheaper?
One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
Can I use either one for free?
Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
How do they charge?
Different approach here. MotherDuck uses hybrid pricing, while Neon goes with usage-based. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
Which one is a better deal?
Depends on what you need. MotherDuck: Sitting in the middle of the modern data warehouse pack — pricier than pure open-source DuckDB setups you'd self-host, but cheaper and lighter-weight than Snowflake or BigQuery for teams that don't need massive distributed compute. They're courting teams who want warehouse power without warehouse overhead or price tags. Neon: Neon isn't competing on a low headline price — it's competing on architecture, pitching serverless Postgres with instant branching to teams who'd otherwise run RDS or self-hosted Postgres. The usage-based model makes it cheap to start but hard to benchmark against flat-rate competitors like Supabase, which puts pressure on Neon to prove the 'typical spend' numbers hold up in practice.

Still deciding? See the best MotherDuck alternatives or the best Neon alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.

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