by Neon (Databricks)Managed Postgres
Serverless Postgres billed by compute hours, with scale to zero, branches that start as copies of your data, and a free plan of 100 projects.
Postgres you pay for by the compute hour, with scale to zero, branches that start with your data, and a free plan of 100 projects.
Neon bills compute-unit hours, storage and restore history with no plan fee or monthly minimum, and compute can scale to zero when a database is idle. Branches start as copies of their parent’s data and are billed only for what changes, which suits preview and staging environments. The free plan includes 100 projects with 1 GB of storage each and needs no card.
Against 3 other products we reviewed in Managed Postgres: what you pay for with each, the five access facts, the plan limits we recorded and each review's bottom line. The note under the table says how each one was checked.
| Metric | Neon | Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL | PlanetScale | Supabase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you're paying for | Worth the pricePostgres you pay for by the compute hour, with scale to zero, branches that start with your data, and a free plan of 100 projects. | Compliance includedManaged Postgres in your own AWS account from $0.016 an hour, with point-in-time restore up to 35 days and a self-serve HIPAA BAA. | Worth the priceProduction Postgres at a fixed monthly price per cluster, from $10 for 1 GiB, with SOC 2 Type 2 reports and BAAs on the self-serve plan. | Saves engineering timeA Postgres database with auth, storage and APIs in one project for $25 a month, with daily backups and a choice of 17 AWS regions. |
| Overall score | 6.5 | 6.9Best | 6.7 | 6.0 |
| Free option | Free plan | Free trial | Paid only | Free plan |
| Card to start | No card needed | –Not measured | –Not measured | –Not measured |
| Getting access | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve |
| Starter priceCheapest paid plan | $0.106/CU-hour | $0.016/hour | $5/mo | $25/mo |
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based | Seat + usage |
| Pricing page | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices |
| Billing units | Compute-unit hours, storage and restore history (GB-month) | Instance hours, storage (GB-month), backup storage above the free amount, CPU credits | Cluster size per month, storage above 10 GB, backups above 2× disk | Plan fee, compute hours, disk (GB) |
| Free plan | 1 GB per project, 100 projects, 100 CU-hours each; no card | None; AWS Free Tier credits for new accounts | None; single node from $5/mo | 500 MB per project, 2 projects; paused after 1 week inactive |
| 10 GB app with staging, per month | $28.06 on Launch, computed | $19.10 on db.t4g.micro, computed | $15 on Base, computed | $35.06 on Pro, computed |
| Point-in-time recovery | Up to 7 days on Launch at $0.20/GB-month; 30 on Scale | Up to 35 days, no add-on; extra backup storage $0.095/GB-month | 2 days by default; longer with custom backup schedules | $100/mo add-on per 7 days; needs Small compute |
| Automatic backups at no extra charge | None; history and snapshots billed per GB | 7 days by default (console); free up to provisioned storage | Every 12 hours, kept 2 days | Daily, kept 7 days (Pro) |
| SOC 2 Type II report | Scale plan | AWS reports in AWS Artifact, any account | Base plan (ISO 27001 not stated) | Team plan ($599/mo) |
| HIPAA BAA | Scale plan, self-serve | Self-serve in AWS Artifact | Base plan, on request | Team plan, paid add-on |
| EU regions | Frankfurt, London | Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, Spain | Frankfurt, Dublin (AWS); Belgium, Netherlands (GCP) | Ireland, Paris, Frankfurt, Stockholm |
| SAML SSO for the dashboard | Not listed | IAM Identity Center, no extra charge | $199/mo add-on on Base | Listed on Team; table says Contact Us |
| Branch with production data | Yes, every branch starts as a copy | Yes, by restoring a snapshot or point in time to a new instance | Yes, by restoring a backup to a branch | Needs the PITR add-on |
| Bottom line | From its public pages, Neon has the most generous free plan and the most flexible branches here, and usage billing suits databases that are often idle. Compliance and longer restore windows move you to Scale, at about twice the compute rate. | From its public pages, RDS for PostgreSQL includes the most recovery and compliance here at a low listed price, all self-serve. The bill has more lines to estimate than the others, and there is no permanent free plan. | From its public pages, PlanetScale lists the lowest price for our scenario and the most compliance on its entry plan, with backups and PITR included. There is no free plan, and its Postgres branches are separate databases rather than copies. | From its public pages, Supabase gives the most around the database: auth, storage and APIs with daily backups for $25. For a database alone, PITR as a flat add-on and per-hour branches make it the highest-priced of the three in our scenario. |
Evidence: Neon: facts checked 2026-10-15 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL: facts checked 2026-10-15 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; PlanetScale: facts checked 2026-10-15 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Supabase: facts checked 2026-10-15 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run. Prices in USD as listed, excluding tax. "–" means not recorded.
Review from public pages
Written from Neon's public pages (pricing, security or privacy, and docs) as read on Oct 15, 2026. We did not sign up, and no hands-on run is published yet.
We read Neon's pricing page and its docs on plans, backups, the history window, HIPAA, compliance and regions on Oct 15, 2026; we did not sign up for this review. Neon's pages now present it as part of Databricks, and the docs call the database Lakebase Postgres. Launch and Scale have no plan fee: you pay for compute-unit hours (one CU is about 4 GB of RAM), storage per GB-month, the change history kept for restores, and egress above 500 GB per project, with no monthly minimum.
Compute scales to zero after 5 minutes of inactivity; on Launch you can turn that off, which an always-on production database needs. Branches are the main idea: a child branch starts as a copy of its parent's data and is billed only for the changes written to it, capped at its data size. Launch includes 10 branches per project.
Recovery comes from restore history rather than included backups: the history window defaults to 1 day on paid plans, goes up to 7 days on Launch and 30 on Scale, and is billed at $0.20 per GB-month. SOC 2, ISO 27001 and a self-serve HIPAA BAA are listed for Scale. The HIPAA docs say it costs nothing extra today and that a 15% surcharge will apply once charging starts; the plans page already calls it an additional charge.
100 projects, each with 1 GB of storage and 100 CU-hours a month, not paused for inactivity, and no credit card.
vs PlanetScale: Supabase’s free plan has 2 active projects of 500 MB that pause after a week; PlanetScale has no free plan.
Compute can scale to zero when idle, so a staging branch used 176 hours a month costs $4.66 of compute on Launch.
vs Supabase: Supabase bills a branch for every hour it exists ($9.81 a month at Micro).
A child branch starts with the parent’s data and is billed for the changes made to it, capped at its data size; Launch includes 10 per project.
vs PlanetScale: PlanetScale and Supabase branches start empty unless restored from a backup or created with the PITR add-on.
Set the history window up to 7 days on Launch (30 on Scale) and pay $0.20 per GB-month of history.
vs Supabase: Supabase’s PITR is a $100-a-month add-on per 7 days.
SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, IP Allow and private networking are listed for Scale, where compute costs $0.222 per CU-hour instead of $0.106.
Restore history and snapshots are billed per GB ($0.20 and $0.09 per GB-month), and the default history window on paid plans is 1 day.
Workaround: The docs describe scheduled pg_dump backups to your own S3 bucket.
The plans page lists unlimited organization members, but the pricing page and docs list no SAML SSO or audit log for the Neon console.
With no plan fee, the bill depends on how many hours compute runs and how much history you keep.
Workaround: Spending notifications are available on Launch and Scale.
Neon has no plan fee on Launch or Scale and no monthly minimum. Launch bills $0.106 per CU-hour (Scale $0.222), storage at $0.35 per GB-month (child branches only for the data they change), restore history at $0.20 per GB-month, snapshots at $0.09, extra branches at $1.50 a month and egress above 500 GB per project at $0.10 per GB.
For our scenario on Launch: production 0.25 CU × 730 hours = 182.5 CU-hours ($19.35), 10 GB of storage ($3.50), staging 0.25 CU × 176 hours ($4.66) with 1 GB of changes ($0.35) and 1 GB of history ($0.20): $28.06 a month, our arithmetic. If staging ran all month, it would be $42.74; on Scale, for the compliance listings, $54.33.
The docs describe exporting with pg_dump and pg_restore to any standard Postgres, and replicating out with logical replication to a self-hosted or third-party Postgres server.
From its public pages, Neon has the most generous free plan and the most flexible branches here, and usage billing suits databases that are often idle. Compliance and longer restore windows move you to Scale, at about twice the compute rate.
| Limit | As recorded |
|---|---|
| Billing units | Compute-unit hours, storage and restore history (GB-month) |
| Free plan | 1 GB per project, 100 projects, 100 CU-hours each; no card |
| 10 GB app with staging, per month | $28.06 on Launch, computed |
| Point-in-time recovery | Up to 7 days on Launch at $0.20/GB-month; 30 on Scale |
| Automatic backups at no extra charge | None; history and snapshots billed per GB |
| SOC 2 Type II report | Scale plan |
| HIPAA BAA | Scale plan, self-serve |
| EU regions | Frankfurt, London |
| SAML SSO for the dashboard | Not listed |
| Branch with production data | Yes, every branch starts as a copy |
Read from the vendor's public pages on Oct 15, 2026. No hands-on run is published yet. How we check
We have not published a sign-up run for Neon yet. The access facts above were read from its sign-up and pricing pages on Oct 15, 2026.
We have not published API calls for Neon yet.
Neon lists 3 plans. The cheapest paid plan, Launch, costs $0.106/CU-hour.
Prices as listed, USD, excluding tax; observed 2026-10-15.
Source: neon.com pricing page. Prices change; the observed date above is when our agent read them.
We read the pricing, security and docs pages of three managed Postgres services on the same day and scored them on the same six indicators. How each one bills, what a 10 GB app with staging costs, and who should pick which.
