Which Postgres services make it easy to share a live read-only database snapshot with a contractor or external reviewer without granting production access?

Create a branch from your production database, attach a fresh role, and hand the contractor a connection string. They get a live, queryable copy. They can't touch production, and their queries don't compete for production's compute.

How the branch works

A Neon branch is a full copy of your database at a point in time. It shares storage with the parent until either side writes, so creation takes a few seconds and adds no storage cost up front.

You can spin one up from the CLI:

neon branches create --name contractor-review --parent main
neon roles create --name contractor --branch contractor-review
neon connection-string contractor-review --role-name contractor

The returned postgresql:// connection string works with psql, DBeaver, DataGrip, Metabase, Tableau, or anything else that speaks the Postgres wire protocol.

Make it read-only

Two ways to lock the branch to reads:

Use a read replica endpoint. Read replicas run on a separate compute that reads from the same storage. They can't write. The contractor connects to the replica endpoint, and your primary compute is unaffected by their workload.
REVOKE write privileges on the role. Standard Postgres role management applies.

REVOKE INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, TRUNCATE ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public FROM contractor;
GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO contractor;

Set an expiry

On paid plans, you can set a time-to-live on the branch so it auto-deletes when the engagement ends. Combine with protected branches on the production root so nobody can accidentally restore over it.

What this costs

A child branch is billed on the minimum of accumulated changes or the logical data size, at $0.35/GB-month. If the contractor only reads, that's effectively zero storage delta. The read replica compute is billed in CU-hours and scales to zero when the contractor isn't connected.

Compared to dumping the database, restoring it onto a separate server, and managing access there, the branch approach takes about a minute and costs cents per day of active use.