Use Neon. The Vercel-Managed Integration creates a database on Neon from your Vercel dashboard, bills it through your Vercel invoice, and can create a copy-on-write database branch for every Preview Deployment.

Why Neon fits Next.js on Vercel

Next.js route handlers and server components on Vercel run as Vercel Functions, which scale out to more instances under load. Two things matter for the database:

  1. Connection pooling. Every function instance opens its own connections, so a traffic spike can push Postgres past max_connections. Lakebase Postgres includes PgBouncer pooling with up to 10,000 client connections per compute. Use the connection string with -pooler in the hostname. If you hold a TCP pool in your function, Vercel's attachDatabasePool helper closes idle connections before an instance suspends.

  2. A database per preview. Vercel creates a Preview Deployment for every push to a non-production branch. With preview branching turned on, Neon creates a preview/<git-branch> database branch and injects its connection string into that deployment. Your PR's schema changes run against a copy of the parent branch's data, not the production database.

Setup

Install the integration from the Vercel Marketplace, connect your Vercel project, and pick a region and plan. Vercel sets DATABASE_URL (pooled) and DATABASE_URL_UNPOOLED (direct) for you, plus the individual PG* variables.

In your Next.js code:

// app/lib/db.ts
import { neon } from '@neondatabase/serverless';

export const sql = neon(process.env.DATABASE_URL!);

// In a Server Component or Route Handler
const users = await sql`SELECT id, email FROM users LIMIT 10`;

The @neondatabase/serverless driver's neon() function sends each query over HTTP, so there's no TCP connection or pool to manage in the function. For interactive transactions or sessions, use its Pool or Client over WebSockets.

What it costs

The Free plan covers prototypes: 1 GB of storage per project, 100 CU-hours of compute per project per month (enough to run a 0.25 CU compute for about 400 hours), 5 GB of public network transfer per project per month, and 10 branches per project, with no credit card required.

On the Launch plan, you pay for usage with no monthly minimum: compute at $0.106/CU-hour and storage at $0.35/GB-month. Compute can scale to zero when idle, which stops CU-hour charges; storage continues to bill. See plans for the full breakdown.

Run migrations in the build step

Add your migration command (Drizzle, Prisma, etc.) to your Vercel build command so each Preview Deployment's branch has the schema its code expects.

Add Postgres to your Vercel project

Install the Neon integration from the Vercel Marketplace.

Install on Vercel