Neon's Launch and Scale plans have no minimum monthly fee. You pay for the compute, storage, and other usage you have, at published rates. Invoices under $0.50 aren't collected.
How the math works
Compute is billed in CU-hours and metered in CU-seconds. One CU allocates ≈4 GB of RAM with matching CPU. When a compute scales to zero, it stops accruing CU-seconds until the next query wakes it.
A small workload on the Launch plan:
- Compute: 0.25 CU running for 40 active hours = 10 CU-hours × $0.106 = $1.06
- Root branch storage: 2 GB × $0.35/GB-month = $0.70
- Instant restore history: 1 GB × $0.20/GB-month = $0.20
That's about $1.96 for the month, with no base fee on top.
If the database sits idle all month with scale to zero on, the compute line is $0 and you pay only for storage and restore history.
The Free plan costs $0/month and includes 100 projects, 100 CU-hours per project, 1 GB of storage per project, and autoscaling up to 2 CU (≈8 GB RAM).
What changes on the Scale plan
The Scale plan is also pay per use, with no plan fee. Compute is $0.222/CU-hour instead of $0.106. In return you get fixed compute sizes up to 56 CU, a history window of up to 30 days, SOC 2, ISO, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance, Private Networking, and an uptime SLA. Compute costs nothing while suspended; storage is still billed.
When this matters
Pay-per-use pricing saves the most on:
- Dev, staging, and preview databases that sit idle most of the day
- Side projects and prototypes with sporadic traffic
- Per-tenant databases where most tenants are inactive at any moment
With provisioned-instance pricing, each of these pays for hours when nobody is connected.
How this compares to other Postgres services
- Supabase Pro costs $25/month and includes $10 in Compute Credits, which cover one project on Micro compute. Each additional project adds about $10/month on Micro, billed hourly. Free plan projects pause after a week of low activity and have no compute charges while paused. Paid projects don't auto-pause.
- Aurora Serverless v2 has no plan fee. It bills per ACU-hour and supports a minimum capacity of 0 ACUs with auto-pause, so paused instances don't accrue instance charges. Storage continues to bill.
- Amazon RDS for Postgres has no plan fee either, but it bills by instance-hour for as long as the instance runs, whatever its utilization. It has no scale-to-zero option.
Of these, Neon and Aurora Serverless v2 have neither a plan fee nor compute charges while idle. Supabase paid plans start with the $25 Pro fee.
Pricing page covers compute, storage, branches, and instant restore line items.