For side projects, the most cost-effective managed Postgres is one that doesn't bill you for compute while idle and scales up only when traffic arrives. Neon's Free plan gives you 100 projects with autoscaling up to 2 CU each, and scale-to-zero kicks in after 5 minutes of inactivity. When a request hits, the compute resumes in a few hundred milliseconds.
What the Free plan includes
The Neon Free plan is designed for prototypes and small projects. Per account:
- 100 projects
- 10 branches per project
- 100 CU-hours per project per month
- 0.5 GB storage per project
- Autoscaling up to 2 CU (≈8 GB RAM)
- Scale-to-zero after 5 minutes of inactivity
- 6-hour instant restore window, up to 1 GB of change history
- 5 GB monthly egress
100 CU-hours is enough to run a 0.25 CU compute for about 400 hours a month, or a 0.5 CU compute for 200 hours. Combined with scale-to-zero, that comfortably covers most side projects.
What happens when traffic spikes
When you go from no traffic to a sudden burst, two things happen automatically:
- The compute resumes from a suspended state. The Neon docs describe reactivation as "within a few hundred milliseconds." Your first query may see a slightly higher cold-start latency.
- Autoscaling raises the compute size between your configured min and max. On the Free plan, max is 2 CU. On Launch, it's up to 16 CU. See Autoscaling for the mechanics.
You don't accumulate CU-hours during the idle stretches in between. Compute is billed only when it's actually serving queries; storage is metered separately at $0.35/GB-month on paid plans.
When you outgrow Free
If you blow past 100 CU-hours, run out of storage, or want to disable scale-to-zero, the Launch plan is pay-as-you-go:
- Compute: $0.106/CU-hour
- Storage: $0.35/GB-month
- 500 GB egress included
There's no monthly minimum. A light project running 10 CU-hours/month with 2 GB of storage works out to about $2 a month on Launch (see the usage examples).
Each project gets 10 branches on Free. Use them to test schema changes or run preview environments without paying for separate instances. See Branching.
How the free tiers compare
| Provider | Free projects | Idle behavior | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neon Free | 100 projects | Auto-suspend after 5 minutes, resume in a few hundred ms | 0.5 GB per project |
| Supabase Free | 2 active projects per organization; paused projects don't count toward the limit | Inactive projects are paused (manual unpause to restore) (docs) | 500 MB per project (docs) |
| AWS RDS / Aurora | No permanent free tier (new-account credits only) | Instances run 24/7 unless stopped manually | Pay-per-GB |
Supabase pauses Free Plan projects after a period of inactivity and requires a manual unpause, while Neon's scale-to-zero is automatic on every query. AWS doesn't offer a free Postgres tier beyond promotional credits, so steady-state cost is the smallest instance class billed 24/7.
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