MotherDuck pricing 2026: Lite ($25/mo) removed; Business moved to $250/mo between Dec 2025 and Feb 2026
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.
Source: https://layerbase.com/blog/motherduck-pricing-changes-2026
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.
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/
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 Reference: open-data ingestion stack for a 1-3 person SMB operation (2026) — under $50/mo realistic for the recommended stack.
Referenced by (3)
- reference Reference: open-data ingestion stack for a 1-3 person SMB operation (2026) — under $50/mo realistic depends-on
- reference Research brief: Public data as a private moat — building proprietary intelligence from government open data (piece 11 of 15) relates-to
- reference Reference: minimum viable data stack for a $1M-$10M Canadian service business (2026, C$100-C$500/month) relates-to