Pricing Overview
Yellowbrick Data uses a vCPU-based pricing model for its enterprise data warehouse software, with three subscription tiers designed around commitment length and usage patterns. The software license is priced separately from infrastructure costs -- you pay Yellowbrick for the data warehouse engine and cover your own cloud or on-premises compute and storage independently. This separation gives teams flexibility to deploy on AWS, Azure, GCP, or bare-metal infrastructure while keeping licensing costs predictable. All plans include the full Yellowbrick Enterprise Edition feature set with no feature gating between tiers. The pricing structure rewards longer commitments with meaningful per-vCPU discounts, while an on-demand option covers burst workloads without a long-term contract.
Plan Comparison
Yellowbrick offers three pricing tiers based on commitment duration:
| Feature | One-Year Subscription | Three-Year Subscription | On-Demand (Monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $613 per vCPU/year | $482 per vCPU/year | $0.28 per vCPU/hour |
| Billing | Annual | Annual | Monthly (per-second metering) |
| Commitment | 1 year | 3 years | None |
| Savings vs. On-Demand | ~75% | ~80% | Baseline |
| Enterprise Features | Full | Full | Full |
| Deployment Options | AWS, Azure, GCP, On-Prem | AWS, Azure, GCP, On-Prem | AWS, Azure, GCP, On-Prem |
| Infrastructure Costs | Separate (your cloud account) | Separate (your cloud account) | Separate (your cloud account) |
The three-year subscription at $482 per vCPU/year delivers roughly a 21% discount compared to the one-year plan at $613. On-demand pricing at $0.28 per vCPU/hour annualizes to approximately $2,453 per vCPU, making subscriptions the clear choice for steady-state workloads. On-demand billing uses per-second metering, so you pay only for actual compute time during burst analytics or seasonal peaks.
Hidden Costs
Yellowbrick's listed prices cover only the software license. You still need to budget for cloud infrastructure (compute instances, object storage, and networking) in your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account. On-premises deployments require separate hardware infrastructure subscriptions available directly from Yellowbrick -- contact sales@yellowbrick.com for those quotes. Data egress fees from your cloud provider apply when moving query results across regions. Migration tooling partnerships (Next Pathway, Datometry) may carry their own licensing costs depending on the scope of your database migration project.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
Because Yellowbrick publishes concrete per-vCPU rates, we can model realistic annual software costs across team sizes. These estimates cover the Yellowbrick license only and exclude underlying cloud infrastructure.
| Team Size | vCPUs (Estimated) | One-Year Plan (Annual) | Three-Year Plan (Annual) | On-Demand Equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small (5-10 analysts) | 16 vCPUs | $9,808 | $7,712 | $39,245 |
| Mid-size (20-50 analysts) | 64 vCPUs | $39,232 | $30,848 | $156,979 |
| Enterprise (100+ analysts) | 256 vCPUs | $156,928 | $123,392 | $627,917 |
The on-demand column assumes 24/7 usage to show worst-case annualized cost. In practice, burst workloads running 8-10 hours per day would cut on-demand spend by 60-70%. The three-year subscription saves roughly $33,500 annually over the one-year plan at 256 vCPUs -- a meaningful reduction for large deployments.
How Yellowbrick Data Pricing Compares
Yellowbrick occupies a distinct niche as an enterprise SQL data warehouse with transparent per-vCPU pricing. Here is how it stacks up against alternatives in the data infrastructure space:
| Platform | Pricing Model | Starting Price | Free Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yellowbrick Data | Per vCPU subscription | $482/vCPU/year (3-year) | Trial available | Enterprise data warehousing, high-concurrency SQL analytics |
| Neo4j | Freemium | $65/mo (AuraDB Professional) | AuraDB Free | Graph databases, relationship-heavy queries |
| InfluxDB | Open Source / Paid | $250/mo (Cloud) | Community Edition (self-hosted) | Time-series data, IoT monitoring |
| TimescaleDB | Freemium | $30/mo (Cloud) | Self-hosted (free) | Time-series on PostgreSQL, hybrid workloads |
Yellowbrick targets a fundamentally different workload profile than these competitors. While Neo4j, InfluxDB, and TimescaleDB serve specialized data models (graph, time-series), Yellowbrick focuses on general-purpose SQL analytics at petabyte scale. Its per-vCPU pricing is more transparent than the consumption-based models common among cloud data warehouses like Snowflake or Databricks, where costs can spike unpredictably with query volume. Teams migrating from legacy platforms like Teradata or IBM Netezza will find Yellowbrick's pricing structure simpler to forecast and budget.