Databricks pricing at a glance
Databricks offers pay-as-you-go pricing with no up-front cost and per-second billing for the products used. Pricing is based on compute usage; storage, networking, and related costs vary with the selected services and cloud provider. Prices can also vary by cloud provider and geographic region.
Choose an entry path
Free Edition: a no-cost, serverless-only, quota-limited workspace for learning and experimentation. It is intended for non-commercial use. It replaced the legacy Databricks Community Edition, which was retired in 2025.
Free trial: provides access to the Data + AI Platform. Some trials include Databricks service credits; eligibility, credit amount, and expiration are determined after account creation, and a trial ends when available credits are exhausted.
Pay as you go: suitable when usage does not justify a commitment; billing is based on use at the applicable Price List rate.
Committed Use Contracts: Databricks says commitments can provide discounts and other benefits, with larger usage commitments associated with greater benefits.
Free Edition limits that matter
Free Edition includes serverless compute and default storage, but it is quota-limited. It has one SQL warehouse limited to 2X-Small, a maximum of five concurrent job tasks per account, and one active Lakeflow pipeline per pipeline type. It does not include guaranteed reliability, support, or service-level agreements. If a quota is exceeded, compute can be unavailable for the rest of the day; data and settings are not deleted while compute is unavailable.
Free Edition also has one workspace and one metastore per account. It does not support R or Scala, private networking configurations, SSO, or SCIM. LinkedIn identity verification can increase some feature limits for eligible accounts, but it does not remove all Free Edition limitations.
How paid billing works
A Databricks Unit (DBU) is a normalized processing-power unit used for measurement and pricing; a workload's DBU consumption can depend on processing metrics such as compute resources used and data processed. For PAYG accounts, Databricks bills the card on file monthly based on usage at the Price List rate, though accrued fees may be billed more frequently. Azure Databricks charges are billed directly by Microsoft under Azure subscription terms.
A free trial does not necessarily eliminate infrastructure charges: when Databricks is configured to use a buyer's own cloud account, the cloud provider can still charge for resources such as compute instances used during the trial. Buyers should check the relevant cloud- and region-specific Price List and account terms before estimating a workload.
Buying considerations
At the end of a trial, Databricks says the account is automatically subscribed to the plan used during the trial; a valid payment method may be needed to continue use, and the subscription can be cancelled.
Promotional discounts and their conditions are identified on the Price List or communicated to eligible customers; Databricks may publish or communicate eligibility, duration, and whether a promotion combines with committed-use discounts.
Free Edition is not a production-service substitute: it is non-commercial, may be deleted after prolonged inactivity, and is not covered by Databricks support policy or an SLA.
Take
Choose Free Edition for qualifying learning or experimentation where its serverless quotas and non-commercial restriction fit. For paid evaluation or production, model compute consumption alongside cloud-provider storage, networking, and infrastructure charges, then consider a commitment only when its terms match expected usage.