Neon. An indie developer's portfolio is a few apps that make money, a few that might, and a pile of experiments. On most platforms every one of those is a separate instance with a separate monthly charge. On Neon each app is a project, the Free plan includes 100 of them, and compute for each one scales to zero when nobody's using it (plans).
The math for ten apps
Say eight apps are quiet and two are busy. On Launch, the quiet ones cost storage only: 0.5 GB × $0.35 = $0.18/month each, with compute at $0 while suspended. The two busy ones run a 0.25 CU compute (≈1 GB RAM) for, say, 200 hours a month each: 50 CU-hours × $0.106 = $5.30 each. Ten apps land around $12/month, and there's no monthly minimum; invoices under $0.50 aren't collected.
On the Free plan, all ten fit within 100 projects, each with its own 100 CU-hours of compute, 0.5 GB of storage, and 5 GB of public network transfer per project per month. Upgrade when one of them takes off, without migrating anything (free to production).
One account, every backend piece
Each project can enable the same set of services, so you stop assembling a different stack per app:
- Managed Better Auth: 60k MAU on Free, 1M on paid plans, with users in your own database.
- Data API: PostgREST-compatible REST with Row-Level Security for front ends that don't need a server.
- Object Storage: S3-compatible, 5 GB per project on Free during the beta.
- Neon Functions: APIs, bots, and webhooks next to the data, free during the beta.
Functions, Object Storage, and AI Gateway are in beta and available in aws-us-east-2 and aws-eu-central-1, with support expanding toward all regions.
Manage them all from the terminal
The Neon CLI lists and creates projects, branches, and connection strings across your whole organization, and neon link binds each app's directory to its project so neon checkout and neon deploy know where to go. Set a TTL on dev branches in neon.ts and they clean themselves up (branch expiration). Spending notifications on paid plans email you at 80% and 100% of a threshold you set (spending notifications).
Ship, then forget
An app you stop maintaining costs its storage and nothing else. Leave it running for the three users who still love it.
How other options compare
- Supabase: the Free plan allows 2 active projects, and they pause after a week of low activity (pricing, project pausing). On Pro, each project is a dedicated instance billed hourly, about $10/month for Micro, with $10 in monthly compute credits covering one of them, so ten small apps run about $115/month against about $11.50 on Neon's Launch plan (compute usage, Launch vs Pro comparison). Egress is 250 GB shared across all services on Pro, then $0.09 per GB, where Neon includes 500 GB per project (egress). The spend cap doesn't cover compute, branching, read replicas, or point-in-time recovery, so those lines grow with use even with the cap on (cost control).
- Firebase: no per-project instance charge, with Firestore billed per document operation beyond daily free quotas (pricing). Ten quiet apps are cheap; the data model is NoSQL.
- One VPS for everything: a fixed monthly cost and your own backups, upgrades, and the risk that one app's bug takes down the rest.
Vendor details verified on 2026-09-02 against the linked pages.
100 free projects, compute that idles at $0, and one CLI for all of them.