MotherDuck

motherduck.com/pricing/Cloud VMcompute/motherduckJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Free allowance: Lite plan, quoted from the FAQ: 'We also offer a Lite plan with 10 GB of storage and 10 hours of Pulse compute per month included.
Verdict: caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
Cost: free tier
Identity: emailno card, no phone
Binding limit: volume-quota10 Pulse compute-hours a month fails before the 10 GB of storage: Pulse is metered per query with a one-second minimum, so a dashboard refreshed every minute exhausts the hours while storage is still nearly empty.
Evidence: documented5 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
Freshness: stale on 2026-12-05checked 2026-11-04 (live); stale on 2026-12-05

Free tier	Lite plan, quoted from the FAQ: 'We also offer a Lite plan with 10 GB of storage and 10 hours of Pulse compute per month included. A credit card is not required to sign up for the free trial or use the Lite plan.' The plan card adds 'Up to 3 internal active users and 2 service accounts' and '10 hrs Pulse compute per month included'. unit hours; metered on wall-clock; perpetual-free
Price	none stated
Limits	volume-quota (binding) 10 Pulse compute-hours a month fails before the 10 GB of storage: Pulse is metered per query with a one-second minimum, so a dashboard refreshed every minute exhausts the hours while storage is still nearly empty. source
Identity	email no card: the FAQ states 'A credit card is not required to sign up for the free trial or use the Lite plan', and the docs state 'Lite without a credit card includes 30 minutes per day at no charge'. No hold exists because no payment method is taken. The signup fields are not quoted, so the email requirement is inferred rather than read, and debit and prepaid acceptance are not stated.
Egress	not stated
Interface	rest, cli REST API, per the MotherDuck REST API page: "REST API reference for managing MotherDuck resources"
Tooling	the provider documents its own "MotherDuck CLI", per the interfaces page
Composes with	DuckDB over 10 GB of managed Parquet is the cheapest analytical layer found, and a local DuckDB client connects to it with the same SQL, so a query developed on the free tier runs unchanged anywhere.
Reliability	no reliability event recorded
Notes	The free tier is Pulse only: Standard, Jumbo and Mega instances require the Business plan. Without a card the plan is 'Lite (with limits)', capped at 30 minutes of Flight compute a day and no scheduling. Historical retention is 1 day on Lite, so time travel is not a backup.
Parsed numbers	has-free-tier 1 volume-quota 10 GB

Evidence 5

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-22	motherduck.com/pricing/	'We also offer a Lite plan with 10 GB of storage and 10 hours of Pulse compute per month included. A credit card is not required to sign up for the free trial or use the Lite plan.', quoted
2026-10-22	motherduck.com/docs/about-motherduck/billing/pricing/	'The Lite plan includes 10 CU hours on Pulse per month. Additional usage is billed at the rates above.' and storage 'Includes 10 GB / month', quoted
2026-10-22	motherduck.com/docs/about-motherduck/billing/pricing/	'Lite without a credit card includes 30 minutes per day at no charge' for Flight compute; Lite plan databases retain 1 day of historical data
2026-11-04	motherduck.com/docs/getting-started/interfaces/	MotherDuck documents a CLI
2026-11-04	motherduck.com/docs/sql-reference/rest-api/motherduck-rest-a	MotherDuck documents a REST API

More fields 1

facets	`{"class": "analytics-free-tier","free_tier_kind": "perpetual-free","shape": {"vcpu": null,"ram_gib": null,"disk_gib": 10}}`

Unknown values 5

egress metered: egress metering was not published
egress terms: a source was read and is silent on this field
per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed
retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer