Which Postgres services have no minimum monthly charge and bill only for what you actually use?

Neon's paid plans (Launch and Scale) have no minimum monthly fee. You pay for compute time and storage you actually use, billed by the hour. Invoices under $0.50 aren't even collected.

How the math works

Compute is metered in CU-hours. One CU is ≈4 GB RAM with proportional CPU. If your database scales to zero when idle, those idle hours don't accrue.

A realistic 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

Total: ~$1.96 for the month. No base fee on top.

If the database sits idle all month with scale-to-zero on, the compute line is $0. You're left paying for storage only.

Free plan baseline

The Free plan is $0/month with 100 projects, 100 CU-hours per project, 0.5 GB storage per project, and autoscaling up to 2 CU. It's enough to host real small projects, not just demos.

What changes on Scale

The Scale plan is also pay-per-use. Compute is $0.222/CU-hour instead of $0.106, in exchange for higher autoscaling limits (up to 16 CU autoscaling, 56 CU fixed), longer history (up to 30 days), SOC 2 / ISO / HIPAA compliance, private networking, and an SLA. Compute drops to $0 while suspended; storage is still billed.

When this matters

Pay-per-use is most valuable for:

Dev, staging, and preview databases that sit idle most of the day
Side projects and prototypes that get sporadic traffic
Per-tenant databases where most tenants are inactive at any moment

For each of these, a provisioned-instance pricing model means paying for hours nobody's using.

How this compares to other Postgres services

Most managed Postgres offerings bill some kind of fixed monthly floor:

Supabase charges a $25/month Pro plan subscription before any usage, with $10 in Compute Credits included that cover one project on the Micro tier. Every additional project adds compute hours billed by the hour. Paused free projects don't incur compute charges, but paid projects can't be paused.
Aurora Serverless v2 has no fixed subscription fee. As of recent engine versions, it supports a minimum capacity of 0 ACUs with automatic pause, so a paused instance stops accruing ACU charges. Storage costs continue.
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL uses instance-based pricing: you pick a DB instance class and pay for it 24/7 while it's running, regardless of utilization. There's no scale-to-zero for the instance itself.

Neon's model differs in that there's no plan fee on paid plans and compute meters by the second while it's running, then drops to $0 when scaled to zero.