# Pricing and ROI Human Guide

## What This Is For
Explain MotherDuck pricing and ROI tradeoffs. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for go-to-market work: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Pricing and ROI agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for pricing and ROI.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Pricing and ROI guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- Always verify current numbers, plan limits, and feature entitlements against the live public pricing page before answering.
- If the MotherDuck MCP `ask_docs_question` feature is available, use it first for pricing-related documentation lookups.
- Use the live pricing, Hypertenancy, and Trust & Security pages for exact commercial framing.
- Do not hardcode pricing numbers unless you have verified them in the current turn.
- When quoting numbers, include the verification date and the public source you checked.
- Separate storage, compute, and operational complexity in every answer.
- Map workload shape to cost shape before comparing vendors or plans.
- Treat many pricing questions as risk, predictability, or procurement questions rather than purely technical ones.
- Identify the workload shape, team size, and comparison baseline.
- Determine whether the real concern is raw spend, predictability, procurement, or operational overhead.
- Map the workload to MotherDuck cost buckets and plan posture.
- Frame ROI in terms of systems replaced, complexity removed, and faster delivery.

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: Source Of Truth, Default Posture, Workflow, Open Next, Related Skills, Supporting file: references/PRICING_ROI_PLAYBOOK.md, Contents, When To Use, SQL-First Cost Attribution Posture, How To Answer.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- Do not hardcode pricing numbers unless you have verified them in the current turn.
- | What Not To Do | Promises and numbers to avoid |
- verify `QUERY_HISTORY` availability, required role, and lifecycle status against current docs before relying on it
- Apply the resulting share to an external invoice only as an internal accounting convention. Do not present this as MotherDuck's official billing breakdown.
- This is especially important when the user is confused by:
- Shares are zero-copy and do not add storage cost by themselves.
- Does the team avoid maintaining a larger warehouse cluster or extra replicas?
- Does `pg_duckdb` avoid a full warehouse migration in phase one?

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Pricing and ROI human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the motherduckdb/agent-skills skill entry for `motherduck-pricing-roi`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# Pricing and ROI

Use this skill when the user is asking whether MotherDuck is financially sensible for their workload, team, or project. This is a workflow skill focused on cost framing, not implementation detail.

## Source Of Truth

- Always verify current numbers, plan limits, and feature entitlements against the live public pricing page before answering.
- If the MotherDuck MCP `ask_docs_question` feature is available, use it first for pricing-related documentation lookups.
- Use the live pricing, Hypertenancy, and Trust & Security pages for exact commercial framing.

## Default Posture

- Do not hardcode pricing numbers unless you have verified them in the current turn.
- When quoting numbers, include the verification date and the public source you checked.
- Separate storage, compute, and operational complexity in every answer.
- Map workload shape to cost shape before comparing vendors or plans.
- Treat many pricing questions as risk, predictability, or procurement questions rather than purely technical ones.

## Workflow

1. Identify the workload shape, team size, and comparison baseline.
2. Determine whether the real concern is raw spend, predictability, procurement, or operational overhead.
3. Map the workload to MotherDuck cost buckets and plan posture.
4. Frame ROI in terms of systems replaced, complexity removed, and faster delivery.
5. Call out what still needs live pricing-page or sales confirmation.

## Open Next

- Read `references/PRICING_ROI_PLAYBOOK.md` for workload-to-cost mapping, publicly safe talking points, ROI framing, and what not to promise

## Related Skills

- `motherduck-connect` when the pricing discussion depends on connection-path choices
- `motherduck-security-governance` when compliance, residency, or commercial controls affect ROI
- `motherduck-build-cfa-app` and `motherduck-build-dashboard` when the economics depend on the application architecture

---

## Supporting file: references/PRICING_ROI_PLAYBOOK.md

# Pricing and ROI Playbook

Reference for framing MotherDuck pricing, workload cost drivers, and ROI discussions without overpromising or hardcoding stale commercial details.

## Contents

| Section | Covers |
|---|---|
| SQL-First Cost Attribution Posture | custom_user_agent tagging, service accounts, QUERY_HISTORY |
| How To Answer / Cost Framing Checklist | Workload shape, comparison baseline, real concern |
| Best Practice for Compute Attribution | Tagging convention plus inspection SQL |
| Service Accounts as Billing Boundaries | Duckling boundaries, per-customer attribution SQL |
| Internal Chargeback and Customer Billing | Workload vs tenant chargeback models |
| Storage and Lifecycle Visibility | STORAGE_INFO and retention-driven cost |
| Public Pricing Structure / Compute Realities | Plans, instance types, cooldown, SHUTDOWN |
| Workload-to-Cost Mapping | Instance-type heuristics |
| ROI Questions and Guidance | What MotherDuck replaces or simplifies |
| Plan-Aware Talking Points | Publicly positioned plan differences |
| What Not To Do | Promises and numbers to avoid |

## When To Use

- The user asks about pricing, spend, invoices, budget caps, or plan fit.
- The user is comparing MotherDuck with another warehouse or lakehouse from a cost perspective.
- The user wants a pilot or rollout framed in ROI terms.

## SQL-First Cost Attribution Posture

- Connect pricing to workload shape, isolation boundaries, and compute ownership, not to programming language.
- Use `custom_user_agent` to tag the workload, pipeline, tenant, or internal service that issued the queries.
- Use service accounts deliberately when you need a stable billing and attribution boundary.
- Use SQL over `MD_INFORMATION_SCHEMA.QUERY_HISTORY` and storage views for internal reporting or chargeback.

## How To Answer

Work through these questions in order:

1. What workload shape is being priced?
2. What team size or consumption pattern matters?
3. What alternative is the user comparing against?