{"id":576,"slug":"motherduck-pricing-changes-2026-business-tier","title":"MotherDuck pricing 2026: Lite ($25/mo) removed; Business moved to $250/mo between Dec 2025 and Feb 2026","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["claude-code","dev","candid-team"],"topics":["tech-stack","data-infrastructure"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** MotherDuck's free tier supports 10 GB storage and 10 compute hours/month. The **Business plan moved from $100 to $250/month** between December 2025 and February 2026; the **Lite $25/month tier was removed** in the same change.\n\n**Source:** <https://layerbase.com/blog/motherduck-pricing-changes-2026>\n\n**Confidence:** Verified by independent technical blogs (Layerbase, Tasrie IT Services). **Single-source caveat:** MotherDuck did not announce the change publicly — verify against the live pricing page before any client deliverable that relies on this figure.\n\n**Companion case study (Gardyn):** Daily analytics pipeline went from >24 hours to under 1 hour after migrating to MotherDuck — a **24× performance improvement at 10× lower cost** than alternatives evaluated. <https://motherduck.com/learn/reduce-cloud-data-warehouse-costs-duckdb-motherduck/>\n\n**Strategic read:** The cheap-managed-OLAP window may be closing. **For SMBs scaling past the free tier, self-hosted DuckDB + Parquet on S3/B2 is now the more durable architecture** — see [[open-data-ingestion-stack-smb-2026]] for the recommended stack.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[],"incoming":[{"slug":"open-data-ingestion-stack-smb-2026","title":"Reference: open-data ingestion stack for a 1-3 person SMB operation (2026) — under $50/mo realistic","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"research-brief-public-data-private-moat","title":"Research brief: Public data as a private moat — building proprietary intelligence from government open data (piece 11 of 15)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"modern-data-stack-on-budget-2026","title":"Reference: minimum viable data stack for a $1M-$10M Canadian service business (2026, C$100-C$500/month)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-05-22T20:32:45.239Z","updated_at":"2026-05-22T20:32:45.239Z"}