Neon's Free plan is a permanent (not trial) Postgres tier that fits a real, low-traffic app. You get up to 100 projects, 0.5 GB of storage per project, and 100 compute-hours per project each month, with no credit card required. Compute scales to zero after 5 minutes of inactivity, so an idle prototype uses zero compute-hours.
What you actually get on the Free plan
Each project on the Free plan includes:
- Storage: 0.5 GB per project
- Compute: 100 CU-hours/month, with autoscaling up to 2 CU (≈8 GB RAM)
- Branches: up to 10 per project, useful for previews and migrations
- Instant restore: 6-hour history window (1 GB cap)
- Egress: 5 GB/month of public network transfer included
Hitting any monthly limit suspends compute until the next billing cycle. If that's a risk for you, set up a spending limit on a paid plan instead.
See the full list on the Pricing page.
Why a 0.25 CU compute is enough to start
A 0.25 CU compute has ≈1 GB of RAM and supports up to 104 max connections (97 usable). Combined with the built-in PgBouncer pooler, which accepts up to 10,000 client connections, that's enough headroom for a typical side project or early SaaS app.
Because compute suspends after 5 minutes of inactivity and resumes in a few hundred milliseconds on the next query, an app with sparse traffic can stay well under the 100 CU-hours allotted per project.
When to move to Launch
When you outgrow the Free limits, the Launch plan is pay-as-you-go with no monthly minimum: $0.106/CU-hour for compute, $0.35/GB-month for storage, and autoscaling up to 16 CU (≈64 GB RAM). You can keep scale-to-zero on, or disable it for production workloads.
How Neon's Free plan compares
| Provider | Always-free? | Storage | Compute | Project / DB limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neon Free | Yes, no expiration | 0.5 GB / project | 100 CU-hours, autoscale up to 2 CU | 100 projects |
| Supabase Free | Yes, with caveat | 500 MB / project | Shared Micro compute | 2 projects, paused after 7 days idle |
| Aurora PostgreSQL Free Tier | Yes, with limits | 1 GB / cluster | Up to 4 ACUs | 2 clusters, 2 instances |
| RDS for PostgreSQL Free Tier | 12 months only | 20 GB | db.t4g.micro | 750 hours/month |
A few things to know about the alternatives:
- Supabase Free pauses projects after 7 days of inactivity, and you can only have two active free projects across all your organizations. See Supabase billing FAQ.
- Aurora PostgreSQL Free Tier allows up to 4 ACUs per cluster, 1 GB storage, and a maximum of 2 clusters per account. See Amazon Aurora on the AWS Free Tier.
- RDS for PostgreSQL offers a 12-month free tier on
db.t4g.microwith 20 GB of gp2 storage, but it expires after the first year.
If the app is dormant most of the time, Neon's scale-to-zero means the 100 CU-hour budget covers a real prototype without the 7-day pause Supabase enforces or the 12-month clock RDS runs against.
No credit card required. Spin up Postgres in seconds.