Neon

Neon is a PostgreSQL-compatible service built around copy-on-write storage and ephemeral compute. You create projects and branches: a branch can represent production, a preview environment per pull request, or an experimental migration path. Compute scales with load and can scale to zero after idle (about five minutes of inactivity on default setups), while storage retains data and branch history for instant restore and time travel within configured windows. The wire protocol is standard Postgres, so ORMs and drivers (Prisma, Drizzle, raw SQL) work as expected—pooling guidance still matters for serverless runtimes that open many short-lived connections.

Neon’s published pricing (neon.tech/pricing, March 2026) includes a generous Free tier: many projects per account, per-project included compute measured in CU-hours, storage per project, branching, autoscaling, and Neon Auth included up to 60k MAUs on Free. Launch and Scale are pure usage-based with no flat minimum: compute is billed per CU-hour (published examples include about $0.106/CU-hour on Launch and $0.222/CU-hour on Scale), database storage about $0.35/GB-month, and history storage for point-in-time restore about $0.20/GB-month. Extra branches beyond included counts can incur per-branch-hour fees (on the order of $0.002 per branch-hour in published tables). Typical spend examples on the site run from about $15/month for intermittent small workloads to hundreds for high-load profiles—your dashboard is authoritative.

Neon shines for teams that want Postgres semantics with database-per-preview workflows and cost that tracks intermittent usage. Compare Amazon RDS or Aurora when you want fixed always-on instances with traditional procurement; compare PlanetScale if you standardize on Vitess/MySQL; compare Supabase when you want auth, storage, and realtime bundled with Postgres.