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Motherduck: the future of cost-efficient analytics

By Mark Your Data | January 2025

The missing piece of your data stack

You've built the perfect cost-efficient data platform with DLT for data ingestion and DBT for transformation. You're saving over €15.000/year compared to Fivetran. Your pipelines run smoothly in Docker containers. But there's one more piece that could revolutionize your analytics: where you query that data.

The traditional warehouse problem

After saving thousands with DLT and DBT, many companies default to BigQuery or Snowflake for their analytics layer. These are powerful tools, but they come with challenges:

  • Slow query response times - Multi-second delays even for simple queries
  • Dashboard loading waits - 8-15 seconds to load business dashboards
  • Expensive at scale - Costs grow with data volume and query frequency
  • Over-engineered - Distributed systems add complexity you may not need

What if there was a better way? A warehouse that's 4x faster than BigQuery, costs a fraction of traditional solutions, and integrates perfectly with your DLT + DBT stack?

Enter motherduck: duckdb meets the cloud

MotherDuck extends DuckDB's lightning-fast analytical engine to the cloud with collaborative features and serverless infrastructure.

What makes it special?

DuckDB is an in-memory OLAP database that runs locally on your machine. It's incredibly fast because it leverages modern hardware efficiently - your laptop today is more powerful than expensive cloud instances from a few years ago. MotherDuck takes this local performance and makes it collaborative and scalable.

Dual execution: best of both worlds

Here's where MotherDuck gets clever. Traditional warehouses force you to choose: run everything locally (fast but isolated) or run everything in the cloud (collaborative but slow). MotherDuck gives you both:

  • Local processing - Leverage your machine's power for speed
  • Cloud scale - Access shared data and run heavy workloads remotely
  • Intelligent routing - Automatically determines where to run each query
  • Zero data movement - Query across local files, S3, and MotherDuck seamlessly

Browser-based analytics

MotherDuck can run DuckDB directly in your browser using WebAssembly. This means analysts can execute complex queries without server round-trips, eliminating network latency entirely. It's like having a personal data warehouse that runs at local speed.

The performance numbers

Independent benchmarking by Artefact compared MotherDuck against BigQuery and PostgreSQL using industry-standard TPC-H tests on a 10GB dataset:

Query performance (tpc-h)

  • MotherDuck: 21 of 22 queries in under 1 second
  • BigQuery: ~4x slower on average
  • PostgreSQL: Significantly slower (not designed for analytics)

Dashboard loading (67m rows, 9gb)

  • MotherDuck: 3.35 seconds
  • BigQuery: 8.55 seconds
  • PostgreSQL: 216+ seconds (3+ minutes!)

Real-world impact: When dashboards load in 3 seconds instead of 8-15 seconds, analytics becomes truly interactive. Users explore more, find insights faster, and actually enjoy working with data.

Cost efficiency: serverless pricing

MotherDuck uses pay-per-compute pricing, not always-on infrastructure:

  • No minimum fees - Pay only when queries run
  • Typical cost: $20-40/month for teams running thousands of queries
  • Compare to BigQuery: Running 22 TPC-H queries costs $0.03 vs $0.60-1.00
  • Compare to always-on systems: Save $300-500/month in baseline infrastructure

Perfect integration with dlt + dbt

Here's where it all comes together. Your complete, cost-efficient data stack:

  1. DLT for Data Ingestion - Load raw data from APIs, databases, files into your warehouse. Save over €15K/year vs Fivetran.
  2. DBT for Transformation - Transform raw data into clean, tested, documented models. Increase analyst productivity 3-5x.
  3. MotherDuck for Analytics - Query your gold-layer data at sub-second speeds. 4x faster than BigQuery, serverless pricing.

All three components are open-source or open-core, version controlled, and run in lightweight Docker containers. Your entire analytics infrastructure costs ~€100-200/month instead of €2,000+/month with traditional tools.

Our Vision: Modern Analytics Should Be Fast AND Affordable

At Mark Your Data, we're obsessed with building data platforms that deliver enterprise capabilities without enterprise costs. We've helped companies save over €20.000/year with our DLT + DBT platform approach, and MotherDuck is the perfect addition to this stack.

Why we're excited

  • True interactive analytics - 3-second dashboard loads change user behavior
  • Cost efficiency - Serverless pricing aligns with actual usage
  • Developer experience - SQL-based, Git-versioned, Python-integrated
  • No vendor lock-in - Built on open-source DuckDB
  • Seamless integration - Works perfectly with our existing DLT + DBT setups

A word of honesty

We haven't implemented MotherDuck for a customer yet. But we can't wait to.

We're transparent about this because we believe in sharing our journey. We've tested MotherDuck extensively, read the research, analyzed the benchmarks, and we're convinced it's the future of cost-efficient analytics. Now we're looking for the right partner to implement it with.

Who should consider motherduck?

MotherDuck is ideal for companies that:

  • Want to create a data warehouse from scratch.
  • Already use (or are building) a DLT + DBT data platform
  • Need fast, interactive analytics for business users
  • Want to reduce data warehouse costs significantly
  • Value simplicity over complexity
  • Have datasets from gigabytes to terabytes (MotherDuck scales to TBs)
  • Run frequent analytical queries rather than large batch processing

When bigquery still makes sense

To be balanced: BigQuery excels at massive-scale batch processing and has deep integration with Google Cloud Platform. If you're processing petabytes or need GCP-native features, BigQuery might still be your best choice. But for interactive analytics on gigabyte-to-terabyte datasets? MotherDuck is compelling.

The complete picture: €25k+ annual savings

Let's add it all up compared to traditional "Modern Data Stack" tools:

❌ traditional stack

  • Fivetran: €18,000/year
  • Cloud Composer: €4,200/year
  • BigQuery (moderate use): €6,000-12,000/year

Total: €28,000-34,000/year

✅ our open-source stack

  • DLT: Free
  • DBT: Free
  • Cloud Run + Scheduler: €1,200/year
  • MotherDuck: €240-480/year
  • Storage: €1,000-2,000/year

Total: €2,500-4,000/year

Save €24,000-30,000 annually!

Be Our First MotherDuck Implementation Partner

We're looking for a forward-thinking company to pioneer this complete, cost-efficient data stack: DLT + DBT + MotherDuck. If you're tired of expensive cloud warehouses and slow dashboards, let's talk.

What you get: Our expertise in DLT and DBT implementation, preferential pricing as our first MotherDuck customer, and a modern analytics platform that saves €25K+/year.

Learn more about the complete stack