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 | Neon | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $250/mo | Custom |
| Number of plans | 3 | 3 |
| Free plan | ||
| Free trial | — | |
| Pricing model | hybrid | usage-based |
Lite
- 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
Popular- 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 roles)
- Support from MotherDuck experts
- 99.9% availability SLA
Enterprise
- Unlimited internal active users and service accounts
- Fixed-cost capacity pricing
- AWS PrivateLink connectivity
- Role-based access control (custom roles)
- HIPAA BAA
Free
- 100 projects
- 100 CU-hrs monthly per project
- 0.5 GB of storage per project
- Sizes up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM)
- Neon Auth: 60K MAUs
- 6-hr time travel/restores
- Access to Autoscaling, Branching, Read Replicas
- Unlimited team members
Launch
- 100 projects
- $0.106 per CU-hr
- $0.35 per GB-month
- Sizes up to 16 CU (64 GB RAM)
- Neon Auth: 1M MAUs
- 7-day time travel/restores
- 3-day metrics/logs in UI
Scale
- 1,000+ projects
- $0.222 per CU-hr
- $0.35 per GB-month
- Sizes up to 56 CU (224 GB RAM)
- 30-day time travel/restores
- 14-day metrics/logs in UI
- Metrics/logs export (Otel, Datadog)
- Private network, IP Allow rules
- SLAs, SOC2, HIPAA
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: Positioned as a cost-efficient alternative to Snowflake and BigQuery for teams that don't need a full data warehouse — the $250 base is approachable, but the compute rates (especially Jumbo and above) put it in mid-market territory. They're clearly targeting data-savvy startups and mid-size teams who want DuckDB's speed without managing infrastructure themselves. Neon: Neon is positioning as the serverless-native alternative to traditional managed Postgres providers like RDS or Supabase — competitive on the low end with a generous free tier, but the Scale tier pricing suggests they're not trying to be the cheapest option at volume. They're going after developers who want autoscaling without the overhead of managing infrastructure.
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