Soda Data Pricing and Soda Cloud Cost for Data Quality in 2026
Soda Team is $750 a month, and the meter that runs on top of it has no printed rate. Here is what each plan includes, what pushes you to Enterprise, and what the same coverage costs at a flat price.
Read-only connection. DataTrail never moves or mutates your data.
Soda costs $0 a month on Free, $750 a month on Team and a custom price on Enterprise. Team is $9,000 a year before usage. Processing beyond the plan allowance is billed in Soda Processing Units at a rate Soda does not publish, and data contracts, SSO, RBAC and private deployment sit in Enterprise. Read from soda.io/pricing and Soda's API reference on 13 October 2026.
Team, per month
Team for a year, before SPUs
License codes in Soda's API
Published rate per SPU
Soda Cloud pricing plans, exactly as listed
These are the plan cards on soda.io/pricing, word for word, read on 13 October 2026. Only Free has a request button. Team and Enterprise both lead to a demo booking, so $750 is a list price you confirm with sales, not a checkout.
- Free Soda Processing Units
- Pipeline testing
- Metrics observability
- Alerting and ticketing integrations
- No credit card required
Button on soda.io reads "Request a Free account"
- All Free features
- Unlimited users
- Pay as you go for additional SPUs
- Catalog integrations
- Add-ons available
Button on soda.io reads "Book a demo"
- All Team features
- Collaborative data contracts
- No-code interface
- Advanced AI-powered data quality features
- Audit logs, custom roles, RBAC
- Private deployment
- SSO
- Premium support
Button on soda.io reads "Book a demo"
Below the Enterprise card Soda adds one line: "Annual billing and volume discounts available". No annual figure is printed, so the only arithmetic you can do from the page is 12 x $750 = $9,000.
Soda Processing Units and what the SPU meter adds to the bill
Free includes "Free Soda Processing Units". Team is "Pay as you go for additional SPUs". Neither card says how many units are included or what an extra one costs. Soda's API reference fills in how the meter behaves, though not its price:
- It accumulates daily. "SPUs are the consumption unit of SPU-based licensing. Consumption accumulates per day."
- It is read by calendar month. The consumption endpoint defaults to the first day of the current month through today.
- It can be prepaid. The plan limits object has a
prepaidSPUsfield, so larger contracts buy a block up front. - Not every customer is on it. An account on another license model gets an error instead of a zero, which confirms older per-dataset and per-user contracts are still in force.
Before you sign Team, ask for three numbers in writing: the SPUs included each month, the pay-as-you-go rate, and how many SPUs one scheduled scan of your largest table consumed during the trial.
Soda license types the price page does not list
Soda's public API reference documents a licensing endpoint that returns the plan an organization is on. Its schema lists nine possible values. Three match the price page. The right-hand column is our reading of each name, and where the docs say nothing we say so.
| Plan code in the API | What it maps to |
|---|---|
trial | Time-boxed; the API returns a trialExpirationTime only on this plan |
free | The $0 plan on the price page |
starter | Not on the price page |
teams | The $750 Team plan |
spus | Consumption licensing, metered in Soda Processing Units |
datasetStandard | Not on the price page; the name points to a per-dataset license |
enterpriseUserBased | Not on the price page; the name points to a per-user license |
premier | Not on the price page |
enterprise | The custom Enterprise plan |
The same schema names the limits a plan grants: active checks, author users, concurrent scans, dataset count, prepaid SPUs and users. Only concurrent scans is always present.
If you bought Soda before the SPU model, you are probably on a dataset or user license. A renewal quote that moves you to SPUs changes what growth costs, so model both before you accept.
No public Soda page prices starter, premier, the dataset license or the user license. Per-dataset dollar figures on directory sites do not appear on soda.io.
Soda Enterprise pricing triggers by feature
Enterprise has no number, so the useful question is which requirement puts you there. Each row is quoted from Soda's documentation or price page as read on 13 October 2026.
| Capability | Plan required | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Soda-hosted Runner | Free, Team and Enterprise | Required for the observability features |
| Self-hosted Runner in your own Kubernetes | Enterprise only | The option that keeps data inside your network |
| Commercial soda package from the private index | Team or Enterprise | Unless you run verifications on a Runner |
| Group By checks | Team or Enterprise | soda-groupby package |
| Reconciliation checks | Enterprise | soda-reconciliation package |
| MySQL, MariaDB, SAP HANA and Oracle from Python | Enterprise | Private index packages, unless you use a Runner |
| SCIM user provisioning | Enterprise | Opt-in, enabled by Soda support |
| Collaborative data contracts, SSO, RBAC, audit logs | Enterprise | Per the price page |
SSO, RBAC, audit logs and SCIM are all Enterprise. If your security team requires single sign-on for any vendor, $750 is not your price.
The self-hosted Runner is Enterprise only and Soda notes it needs Kubernetes expertise. Free and Team use the Runner Soda hosts.
Reconciliation checks, the ones migration and finance teams ask for by name, ship in an Enterprise-only package.
Soda data cost next to Great Expectations, Metaplane, Bigeye and Monte Carlo
Soda is the least expensive hosted data quality product with a printed price. Scope differs by row, and every figure shows where and when we read it.
| Product | Cost per year | Basis | Source, read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Soda Team | $9,000 a year | 12 x $750, before any SPUs beyond the allowance | soda.io/pricing, 13 Oct 2026 |
| GX Core (Great Expectations) | $0 license | Apache-2.0 engine, you host results and alerts | PyPI and GitHub, 30 Sep 2026 |
| Datadog Data Observability (Metaplane) | $19,200 a year at 100 tables | $16 per monitored table a month, billed annually | Datadog price list, 16 Sep 2026 |
| Bigeye | $45,000 a year | 100 monitored tables at list | AWS Marketplace, 26 Aug 2026 |
| Monte Carlo | $50,000 a year | Credit package at list | AWS Marketplace, 15 Sep 2026 |
| DataTrail | $708 to $5,748 a year | Flat plan, unlimited team members, no usage meter | datatrail.ai/pricing |
Full breakdowns are on Great Expectations pricing, Metaplane pricing, Bigeye pricing and Monte Carlo data pricing. For the engine and license comparison, read Soda vs Great Expectations.
Where DataTrail fits for teams pricing Soda
Soda is a testing tool first. You write checks, in YAML or in the UI, and Soda runs them in your pipeline or on a schedule. If your team wants explicit rules in version control and a failed check that blocks a deploy, Soda does that well and Free is a fair place to start.
Plenty of teams reach for Soda to solve something rules do not cover. A column was renamed and three dashboards went blank. A load stopped on Friday and nobody saw it until Monday. Those are lineage and freshness problems, and no one writes a check for a change they did not know was coming. DataTrail connects to Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift or Postgres with a read-only role, builds column-level lineage from query history and your dbt project, and runs freshness monitoring and schema change alerts on every table with no rules to write. Impact analysis lists the downstream models and dashboards before a change ships.
The price has no meter. Starter is $59 a month billed yearly for one warehouse, Team is $179 billed yearly with impact analysis, anomaly detection and unlimited team members, and Scale is $479 for multiple warehouses. Team for a year is $2,148, about a quarter of Soda Team before any processing units. See the pricing page.
What DataTrail does not do: it is not a check-authoring framework, it does not run reconciliation between two systems, and it does not gate a CI job on a YAML rule. Soda's own lineage page describes a two-way integration with the catalog and lineage tools you already run, not a column-level graph it builds itself. If rule-based testing is the requirement, compare Soda with GX Core, and use Soda alternatives and the data quality tools roundup to build the shortlist.
Soda pricing questions buyers ask
How much does Soda cost?
Soda lists three plans: Free at $0 a month, Team at $750 a month and Enterprise at a custom price. Team works out to $9,000 a year before usage, because additional Soda Processing Units are billed pay as you go at a rate Soda does not print. Prices read from soda.io/pricing on 13 October 2026.
What is a Soda Processing Unit?
A Soda Processing Unit, or SPU, is the consumption unit of Soda's usage-based licensing. Soda's API reference says consumption accumulates per day and can be read per period from a licensing endpoint, with the default window starting on the first day of the calendar month. Soda does not publish how many SPUs a scan uses or what one costs.
Is Soda free?
There is a Free plan at $0 a month with no credit card. It includes an allowance of Soda Processing Units, pipeline testing, metrics observability and alerting and ticketing integrations on a Soda-hosted Runner. The price page does not state the size of the allowance, and you request the account from Soda instead of signing up instantly.
Does Soda charge per user?
Not on the Team plan, which lists unlimited users. Soda's API reference does carry license codes named enterpriseUserBased and datasetStandard and limit fields for users, author users, datasets and active checks, so per-user and per-dataset contracts exist, most likely for older or Enterprise customers. Ask which model your quote uses.
Does Soda Team include data contracts?
The price page lists collaborative data contracts, the no-code interface, SSO, RBAC, audit logs and private deployment under Enterprise, not Team. Contract verification from the Python library is available on every plan, so the Enterprise line is the shared authoring and approval workflow in Soda Cloud.
Is Soda Core open source?
Not under an OSI-approved license. Soda Core moved to the Elastic License 2.0 with version 4 in January 2026, and the current release on PyPI, 4.27.0 uploaded on 13 October 2026, declares its license as Proprietary. The 3.x line was Apache-2.0. You can read and run the code, but you cannot offer it as a hosted service.
Is Soda cheaper than Monte Carlo?
At list, yes. Soda Team is $9,000 a year plus metered processing, while Monte Carlo's smallest published package on AWS Marketplace is $50,000 for 12 months. The two meter differently, Soda by processing units and Monte Carlo by credits per monitored table, so get both quotes at your real table count before comparing.
What is a cheaper alternative to Soda?
For freshness monitoring, schema change alerts and column-level lineage on Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift or Postgres, DataTrail costs $59 to $479 a month billed yearly with unlimited team members and no usage meter. GX Core is $0 if you host results yourself. For checks written as YAML rules in CI, Soda remains the specialist.
Where these numbers came from
Soda's price page is drawn with JavaScript, so we rendered it in a headless browser and read the plan cards from the page. The license codes and limit fields come from the Soda Cloud API reference, which Soda publishes as one text file. The Soda Core license was checked on PyPI. Everything below was read on 13 October 2026:
chrome --headless --dump-dom \ https://www.soda.io/pricing # Free $0, Team $750, Enterprise Custom D=https://docs.soda.io/llms-full.txt curl -sL $D/1 | grep -o '"enum":\["trial[^]]*' # trial, free, starter, premier, enterprise, # teams, enterpriseUserBased, # datasetStandard, spus curl -s https://pypi.org/pypi/soda-core/json # 4.27.0, license "Proprietary"
We did not find a Soda listing with a rate card on AWS Marketplace, and we do not repeat per-dataset prices from directory sites because none of them appears on soda.io. Competitor prices were read from each vendor's own price list or marketplace listing on the dates shown in the table and are kept current on their pages here.
Related pages
Testing-first vs lineage-first, and the Soda Core license trail.
License, hosted product and cost after the 2026 changes.
Six tools for dbt projects compared on list price.
Every published price in the category, with sources.
Know what a change breaks at a price with no meter
Connect your warehouse with a read-only role and get column-level lineage, freshness monitoring and schema change alerts the same day. Flat plan, unlimited team members, price on the page.