BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, Fabric: where each one silently inflates your bill

TL;DR Cloud data warehouses trap you with hidden fees: the Scan Tax (charging per terabyte scanned), the Idle Tax (60-second minimums for inactive compute), and the Complexity Tax (opaque billing units). The major incumbents, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, and Fabric, force you into punishing trade-offs between bankrupting your budget on exploratory queries, eating costs for idle time, or suffering through agonizing resume latencies. MotherDuck provides a modern cloud data warehouse alternative designed to eliminate these taxes with a strict 1-second billing minimum, true scale-to-zero architecture, and flat compute pricing for workloads ranging from gigabytes to petabytes with Managed DuckLake (in preview). My worst on-call wakeup wasn't a database melting down at 3 AM. It was an email from finance. Someone had run a query in a BI tool, and it generated a $50,000 Google BigQuery bill overnight. It was a simple, innocent-looking query, the exact kind a jun