Databricks Mosaic AI pricing starts at $0.07 per Databricks Unit (DBU) for artificial intelligence and Genie workloads. This pay-as-you-go model charges based on consumption with per-second granularity, ensuring costs align with actual compute usage.
Workload requirements determine the specific DBU rate. While AI tasks start at $0.07 per DBU, data engineering starts at $0.15 per DBU and interactive workloads begin at $0.40 per DBU. Organizations with high-volume needs can negotiate custom Committed Use Contracts for tiered benefits.
Verified pricing (official source)
| Plan / rate |
Verified price |
Unit |
Notes |
| Databricks Community Edition — Community Edition |
$0 |
free |
Free, limited functionality platform for learning Spark |
| Databricks Data Intelligence Platform — Free Trial |
$0 |
free |
Automatically subscribes to the used plan after trial ends. |
| Operational Database — Starting Price |
$0.07 |
usage based |
Starting at $0.069 / CU. Fully-managed Postgres transactional database for serving data and features. |
| Artificial Intelligence — Starting Price |
$0.07 |
usage based |
Starting at $0.07 / DBU. Build production-quality GenAI or ML apps. |
| Genie — Starting Price |
$0.07 |
usage based |
AI assistance for code, analytics, and enterprise knowledge. |
| Data Engineering — Starting Price |
$0.15 |
usage based |
Starting at $0.15 / DBU. Pay-as-you-go with per second granularity. Includes orchestration for data processing |
| Data Warehousing — Starting Price |
$0.22 |
usage based |
Starting at $0.22 / DBU. Run SQL queries for BI reporting, analytics and visualization. Available in Classic a |
| Interactive workloads — Starting Price |
$0.4 |
usage based |
Starting at $0.40 / DBU. For interactive data science and machine learning workloads. |
| Databricks Platform — Committed Use Contracts |
Custom — contact sales |
other |
Contact Databricks for details. Offers discounts when committing to certain levels of usage. |
Every price above was retrieved from the official vendor page. Plans without a published number are shown exactly as the vendor states them — never estimated.
How do DBU rates vary by workload?
Databricks categorizes compute costs based on the complexity and priority of the task. AI, Genie, and Operational Database workloads share the lowest entry point at $0.07 per DBU. As you move toward production data pipelines and analytics, rates increase to $0.15 for Data Engineering and $0.22 for Data Warehousing. Interactive workloads, typically used for ad-hoc analysis and development, carry the highest starting rate at $0.40 per DBU.
What are the options for committed spend?
For teams scaling beyond pay-as-you-go, Databricks offers Committed Use Contracts. These are custom agreements where the benefit level increases alongside the size of the usage commitment. For individuals or those learning the ecosystem, the Community Edition provides a free, limited-functionality platform specifically for Spark education.
Measuring the value of Databricks spend requires moving beyond DBU consumption to track the time saved in the data-to-model lifecycle. Finance leaders should compare the DBU cost of automated engineering against the labor hours required for manual pipeline maintenance. Using NetLift allows organizations to quantify this break-even point by correlating infrastructure spend with the speed of deploying AI-driven features, ensuring the platform delivers a positive net return compared to baseline labor costs.
Sources
All pricing on this page comes from official vendor pages: