Trino pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
Trino is free. It is open source software under the Apache License 2.0, run as a community project under the non-profit Trino Software Foundation, and the project site at trino.io lists no paid plans or prices. There is no official Trino cloud plan and no paid edition. You download the engine, run it on your own servers or cloud accounts, and pay nothing in license fees.
The license fee is only one part of the budget. Trino uses a coordinator and worker nodes; infrastructure, source-system charges and the work of operating the deployment remain your responsibility.
Plan Comparison
Trino has one edition. The practical choice is whether you run it yourself or buy a managed product built on it.
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| Option | Price | What you get | What you run yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trino (open source) | Free, Apache License 2.0 | Full engine: query federation, in-place analysis of Hadoop, S3, Cassandra, MySQL and more, ANSI SQL | Everything: coordinator, workers, connectors, upgrades, security, monitoring |
| Starburst (built on Trino) | Free tier (up to 3 clusters); Pro from $0.50/credit; Enterprise from $0.75/credit | Pro adds flexible cluster execution modes and streaming ingest; Enterprise adds advanced autoscaling and fine-grained access controls | Less: Starburst manages the clusters |
The open-source engine is not a trial. Starburst Galaxy is a separate managed product: its bill depends on credits consumed, the tier's credit rate and deployment location. A credit rate alone does not establish a monthly bill or a saving over self-hosting. Managed service features and support also differ by tier.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
- Compute. Budget for coordinator and worker capacity over the hours it runs. Size the deployment against measured query concurrency, memory needs and latency requirements; the documentation does not establish one minimum cluster for every production workload.
- Storage and network. Trino queries data in place, so the object storage and databases it reads keep their own charges, and cross-region reads can add data transfer fees from your cloud provider.
- Operations. Assign ownership for sizing, connectors, memory tuning, monitoring, security patches and upgrades. Estimate the work against your existing platform capabilities and service requirements; there is no supported universal staffing minimum.
- Support. Help comes from the community on Slack and GitHub. There is no paid support from the Trino project itself.
Build a Cost Model From Your Workload
For a deployment billed by node-hour, calculate monthly compute as Σ(node-hours × applicable node-hour rate) across coordinator and worker resources. This is compute only: add source-system and storage charges, data transfer, optional support and operating work separately. Use your provider's actual billing terms and discounts.
Measure representative queries and peak concurrency before choosing capacity. Analyst count and scanned terabytes alone do not determine cluster size or establish a break-even point against another engine. Compare the same queries, latency target and availability requirements, including the operational work each option leaves with your team.
How Trino Pricing Compares
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| Tool | Pricing basis | Published prices |
|---|---|---|
| Trino | Free open source | $0, no paid plans |
| Starburst | Credits | Free tier; Pro from $0.50/credit; Enterprise from $0.75/credit |
| Amazon Athena | Managed query service | Check the relevant query or capacity model, source charges and workload constraints |
| MotherDuck | Managed analytical database | Compare the plan's user allowances and compute usage against your workload |
Choose self-hosted Trino when federation and deployment control justify owning the query platform. Compare a managed service when it replaces work your team would otherwise own; the free engine alone does not prove lower total cost. Evaluate the broader platform trade-offs in Snowflake vs Trino and Databricks vs Trino.
Sources
Verified October 23, 2026: Trino license, architecture, deployment, administration and Starburst pricing.