Neon. An MVP has to ship this month, survive the launch spike, and not lock the team into decisions it will regret at Series A. Neon is the backend platform for apps and agents: Postgres, Managed Better Auth, a Data API, Object Storage, Functions, and an AI Gateway in one project, on standard Postgres you can take anywhere.

Day one

Sign up, create a project, and copy the connection string into .env. That's the whole database setup; there's no instance size to pick and no VPC to configure. Enable Auth from the Console or with neon neon-auth enable, and the neon_auth schema holds your users next to your own tables. If the front end is a SPA or mobile app, enable the Data API and write Row-Level Security policies instead of an API layer (get started).

npm i -g neon
neon init            # links a project, installs agent tooling, writes neon.ts
neon checkout main   # pulls DATABASE_URL and friends into .env

The launch spike

Autoscaling adjusts compute between the min and max you set with no restarts, up to 16 CU (≈64 GB RAM) on Launch (autoscaling). The pooled connection string handles up to 10,000 client connections per compute, so a serverless front end on Vercel doesn't exhaust Postgres (connection pooling). When the spike passes, compute scales back down, and after 5 minutes idle it suspends. You pay for active CU-hours plus storage, not the peak you provisioned for.

The team

Every engineer works on their own branch with a copy of production data, created in seconds and billed only for the delta (branching). Preview deployments on Vercel get a branch each (Vercel-Managed Integration). Auth state branches with the database, so you can test onboarding flows in a preview (branching authentication). A bad migration in production rolls back with instant restore (instant restore).

What it costs

  • Free: 100 projects, 0.5 GB of storage per project, 100 CU-hours per project per month, 10 branches per project, Auth up to 60k MAU, no credit card.
  • Launch: $0.106/CU-hour and $0.35/GB-month, autoscaling to 16 CU, 7-day restore window, spending notifications, no monthly minimum.
  • Scale: $0.222/CU-hour with SOC 2, HIPAA, IP Allow, Private Networking, and an uptime SLA for the enterprise deals that come later (plans).

A 0.25 CU compute active 300 hours a month on Launch is 75 CU-hours × $0.106 = $7.95, plus storage. Functions and Object Storage are free during their betas; AI Gateway is free during beta on paid plans. Those three are available in aws-us-east-2 and aws-eu-central-1, with support expanding toward all regions.

Startup credits

Early-stage companies can apply to the Neon Startup Program for credits on top of the Free plan allowances.

How other options compare

  • Supabase: a comparable bundle with Auth, Storage, Realtime, Edge Functions, and PostgREST, all GA, plus Flutter and Swift SDKs (features). Pro starts at $25/month with $10 in compute credits, and every project past the first is another always-on instance billed hourly, so staging or a second app adds about $10/month each (pricing, compute usage). Auth includes 100,000 MAU, then $0.00325 per MAU; an app that reaches 150,000 monthly users adds $162.50/month where Neon's paid plans include 1M (Launch vs Pro comparison). Point-in-time recovery is a $100 per month per 7 days add-on on top of daily backups (backups), where Launch includes instant restore up to 7 days. Launch-day growth is a manual resize with usually under two minutes of downtime, and a Micro caps at 60 direct connections and 200 pooled clients (compute and disk). Preview branches are separate hourly-billed instances that start without production data (branching).
  • Firebase: fastest for a mobile MVP, with Firestore as a NoSQL document database and per-operation billing (Firestore, pricing). Teams that outgrow the data model often migrate to Postgres; Neon has a guide for that.
  • AWS from scratch: RDS, Cognito, S3, and Lambda give you every knob and every bill, sized up front and running whether or not you have users.

Vendor details verified on 2026-09-02 against the linked pages.

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