Methodology & sources
Every number on this site comes from a public price source that we pull automatically. We never type prices in by hand.
Sources
- Azure: the official Azure Retail Prices API (
serviceName eq 'Azure Databricks'), all regions, all meters. - AWS & Google Cloud: the pricing data that powers the instance-type calculator on databricks.com/product/pricing.
- Azure VM prices & DBU ratings (calculators only): Azure's public pricing-calculator feed.
- AWS EC2 prices (calculators only): on-demand Linux, shared-tenancy list prices from the public JSON behind AWS's EC2 On-Demand pricing page, for the 569 instance types Databricks supports in 17 commercial regions. Spot-checked against the official AWS Price List bulk API. GovCloud and a few retired types (i2, r3) aren't priced.
- Google Compute Engine prices (calculators only): on-demand list prices read from Google's official VM pricing pages (general-purpose, compute-optimized and memory-optimized), for 149 of the machine types Databricks supports in 15 regions. Google's Cloud Billing Catalog API needs an API key, so we use the public pages. GPU machine types aren't priced yet, and "-lssd" variants are shown at the standard machine price (Local SSD extra).
Process
Once a day a script downloads each source, normalizes it to cloud, product, tier, region, unit and price, and compares it with the previous snapshot. Price changes, new SKUs and removed SKUs go to the change log, and a dated snapshot is saved to the history archive. If a source fails, we keep its previous prices instead of recording false removals.
Caveats
- These are public list prices in USD. Negotiated discounts, committed-use contracts and DBCU pre-purchase aren't reflected.
- Classic compute is billed twice: Databricks bills DBUs and your cloud provider bills the VMs. The price table shows the DBU part. The calculators add the VMs at on-demand list prices. They leave out storage and disks, networking and egress, Savings Plans, reserved instances, committed-use discounts, spot VMs and negotiated discounts.
- VM prices refresh daily with the rest of the data (last VM refresh: AWS 2026-10-16 00:07 UTC, GCP 2026-10-16 00:07 UTC). If a VM price source fails, the calculators keep the last good prices.
- For AWS and GCP, classic compute has one list price for every region ("All regions"). Serverless and SQL prices vary by region.
- Where a source lists two values for the same price (for example 1.24 and 1.243), we keep the more precise one and flag real conflicts in the raw data.
Last refresh: Oct 16, 2026 00:07 UTC. Digest a333ba48978be5c3. Source errors on last run: none.
DBU Watch is independent and not affiliated with Databricks, Inc., Microsoft, Amazon or Google.