Neon

Neon is a serverless Postgres platform that reimagines how developers run Postgres in the cloud. By separating storage from compute, Neon can autoscale compute up and down with demand and scale to zero when idle — so you pay for what you use — while providing a fully managed, standard Postgres database. Its standout feature is instant database branching: you can create a copy of your database (schema and data) in seconds, just like a Git branch, to test changes, run CI, or spin up per-preview environments without duplicating infrastructure.

The platform is built for modern, developer-centric workflows. Branching enables safe testing, previews, and CI against real data; autoscaling and scale-to-zero optimize cost for variable or bursty workloads; and a generous free tier plus usage-based pricing make it easy to start. Neon offers point-in-time restore, read replicas, connection pooling, and integrations with frameworks and platforms like Vercel and Prisma, and it's become a popular Postgres backend for AI apps and agents that spin up databases programmatically. Being standard Postgres, it works with the existing ecosystem of tools and extensions.

Neon serves developers, startups, and teams building on Postgres who want serverless economics and branching. Pricing is consumption-based with a Free plan ($0, ~0.5 GB storage, 100 compute-hours), a Launch plan (usage: about $0.106 per compute-unit-hour, $0.35/GB-month storage, no monthly minimum), a Scale plan (about $0.222 per compute-unit-hour for production with SLA and compliance), and custom Enterprise. It competes with Supabase, PlanetScale, Amazon RDS/Aurora, and CockroachDB, differentiating on serverless Postgres with instant branching and scale-to-zero.