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)
- Guides: Shared context for better AI agent performance
- 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
- 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
- Unlimited internal active users and service accounts
- Fixed-cost capacity pricing
- AWS PrivateLink connectivity
- IP allowlisting
- 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)
- Unlimited team members
- Managed Better Auth
- 5 GB of Object Storage (Beta)
- Functions (Beta)
Launch
Popular- 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 (Beta)
- Functions (Beta)
- AI Gateway (Beta)
Scale
- 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 (Beta)
- Functions (Beta)
- AI Gateway (Beta)
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: At $250/mo plus consumption fees, MotherDuck isn't chasing hobbyists — it's mid-market priced compared to heavyweight warehouses like Snowflake or BigQuery, betting that DuckDB's speed and simplicity justify a premium over free/open-source but a discount versus enterprise data warehouse contracts. Neon: Neon positions itself as the developer-first alternative to RDS or traditional managed Postgres, betting that serverless scaling and instant branching justify a usage-based model over predictable flat pricing. It's not competing on being the cheapest — it's competing on infrastructure elegance for teams building on Postgres who are tired of provisioning fixed instances.
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