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List prices as of Oct 17, 2026 12:57 UTC

Photon break-even calculator

Photon burns more DBUs per hour. This calculator shows how much faster your job has to run with Photon to come out cheaper, using real instance DBU rates and list prices.

Photon pays off if the job runs at least
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Photon DBU rates per instance come from the Databricks pricing data (AWS, GCP) and Azure's pricing feed (Photon DBU multiplier per VM). The break-even speed-up gets smaller as the VM's share of the bill grows, because Photon doesn't raise the VM price. VM prices are auto-filled with on-demand list prices for all three clouds (override with your own). Speed-ups vary a lot by workload, so benchmark your own job.

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