Infrastructure

Neon

Serverless Postgres with branching. Free tier, instant database branches per PR, autoscaling compute, and scale-to-zero. Acquired by Databricks in 2025.

Try Neonneon.tech

Save

Neon is serverless Postgres built for the modern dev workflow. Branching is the killer feature: you can spin up a copy-on-write branch of your production database for any PR or local dev session in seconds. Compute scales to zero when idle, which makes the free tier genuinely usable. Storage and compute are decoupled, so you can scale them independently. Now part of Databricks, Neon has become the default Postgres choice for new TypeScript projects on platforms like Vercel.

infrastructure database postgres serverless branching

Neon at a glance

Last verified October 17, 2026

Pricing: Free - $0: 100 projects, 100 CU-hours per project per month, 1 GB storage per project, sizes up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM)
Launch - usage-based, $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month, up to 16 CU; typical spend $15/mo
Scale - usage-based, $0.222 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month, up to 56 CU, SLAs, HIPAA, private networking; typical spend $701/mo
Extra branches - $0.002 per branch-hour beyond the plan allowance; no monthly minimum on paid plans
Startup Program - up to $100k in credits; Agent Plan and Open Source Program on request
Install: npm i -g neon@latest
brew install neonctl
bun install -g neon
Models: Serverless Postgres that autoscales from 0.25 CU up to 56 CU and scales to zero when idle, with branching, read replicas, and pgBouncer pooling. On Launch and Scale, the AI Gateway gives access to model providers at their list prices, with no markup, paid from prepaid credits.
Recent changes: Oct 16Neon Realtime enters public beta, Stripe data can sync to Neon in real time, and Managed Better Auth moves to Better Auth 1.7.
Oct 9All AI Gateway models are available with prepaid credits, and you can send feedback from the CLI and MCP Server.
Oct 2The Free plan gets more storage (now 1 GB per project), and embedding models arrive in the Neon AI Gateway.

Sources: Neon pricing, Neon CLI install, Neon changelog

Similar Tools

Infrastructure

Supabase

Open-source Firebase alternative built on Postgres. Auth, real-time subscriptions, storage, edge functions, and pgvector for AI embeddings. Generous free tier.

Infrastructure

Prisma

TypeScript ORM with a schema-first workflow. Prisma Client gives full type safety; Prisma Migrate handles migrations. Prisma ORM 8 covers Postgres, MongoDB, and SQLite; MySQL still needs Prisma ORM 7.

Infrastructure

PlanetScale

Database platform for MySQL on Vitess, PlanetScale Postgres, and Neki (sharded Postgres), with branching, non-blocking schema changes, and horizontal sharding. There is no free or hobby tier; PlanetScale Postgres single node starts at $5/month.

Infrastructure

Vercel

Deployment platform behind Next.js. Git push to deploy. Edge functions, image optimization, analytics. Free tier is generous.

Get started with Neon

Serverless Postgres with branching. Free tier, instant database branches per PR, autoscaling compute, and scale-to-zero. Acquired by Databricks in 2025.

Try Neon

Get weekly tool reviews

Honest takes on AI dev tools, frameworks, and infrastructure - delivered to your inbox.

Subscribe Free

Compare all pricing Compare side by side

More Infrastructure Tools

Vercel

Deployment platform behind Next.js. Git push to deploy. Edge functions, image optimization, analytics. Free tier is generous.

Coolify

Self-hosted PaaS for deploying apps, databases, and services. Git-based deploys, Docker support, preview environments, and a clean UI.

Convex

Reactive backend - database, server functions, real-time sync, cron jobs, file storage. All TypeScript. This site's backend (courses, videos, user data) runs on Convex.