Neon pricing in 2026: calculator and real Postgres bills

TL;DR: On Neon's Launch plan, a Postgres database costs about $3 a month if it sleeps most of the day, $21 if it's small and always on, $87 at 1 CU and $204 when it's busy. Neon bills the hours its compute runs, so the bill depends on whether your database can scale to zero.

• Pick Neon Free if each database is under 1 GB and sleeps more than it runs. 100 CU-hours covers the smallest compute for about 13 hours a day.
• Pick Launch if you want no monthly fee and a database that scales to zero. Kept awake all month, the smallest compute costs $19.35 before storage.
• Pick Scale if you need the uptime SLA, a restore window past 7 days, private networking or HIPAA. Its compute rate is about 2.1 times Launch's.
• Pick Ployz, which I build, if your database is awake all day. The small and medium databases below cost $7 and $11 on a rented server, but you give up branching.

Neon is serverless Postgres: compute can scale to zero when nothing queries it, and you pay for the hours it runs plus the data you store. No plan has a monthly fee.

Rates from Neon's pricing page, checked 8 October 2026. Restore history is $0.20 per GB-month on both paid plans.

What would your database cost on Neon?

Pick the database closest to yours: the four presets are the worked bills below. The side project scales to zero; the other three stay awake all month. To match your own, set the average compute size and hours a day from the Neon console under Customize.

"Hours a day it's running" moves the bill most: at 24 hours, you pay for every hour of the month. The calculator assumes a tenth of your data changes each day, egress under the 500 GB included and branches within the allowance.

How does Neon pricing work?

Neon has three plans: Free, Launch and Scale. Launch and Scale have no monthly fee and no minimum. In Neon's words, "you pay only for what you use; there's no minimum monthly fee" (plans docs). Invoices under $0.50 aren't collected.

Usage is metered hourly and billed at the end of the month. The plans docs also say "higher-volume customers may qualify for annual commits," which is the sales route. There's a separate Agent Plan for platforms that create thousands of databases.

Scale is the same product with a higher compute rate and more around it:

All from Neon's pricing page and plans docs. Spending notifications are emails at 80% and 100% of a threshold you set. They warn you; they don't stop the bill.

If a guide quotes Neon at $19 or $69 a month, or a monthly minimum, it's describing an older price list. Today's plans page has no fixed fee on any plan.

What does Neon charge per CU-hour, GB and branch?

Compute is $0.106 per CU-hour on Launch and $0.222 on Scale. Everything else costs the same on both paid plans.

Storage is billed on your data's logical size. A child branch is billed on whichever is smaller: the changes made on it since you created it, or its full logical size (plans docs). So a branch you keep writing to can grow into a second copy of your data. Restore history is charged on root branches only.

The 500 GB of egress is shared with Neon's other products, Object Storage and Functions. Those, along with Neon Auth and the AI Gateway, are priced separately on the pricing page.

What is a Neon CU-hour?

A CU-hour is one compute unit running for one hour. Neon says each CU allocates "approximately 4 GB of RAM, along with associated CPU and local SSD resources" (plans docs). Sizes go from 0.25 CU (1 GB of RAM) to 56 CU (224 GB).

The formula is compute size times hours running. The docs' examples: 0.25 CU for 4 hours is 1 CU-hour, and 2 CU for 3 hours is 6 CU-hours. With autoscaling, use the average size.

The number that matters is the always-on floor. The smallest compute running all month is 0.25 CU × 730 hours, which is 182.5 CU-hours: $19.35 on Launch and $40.52 on Scale. A 1 CU database running all month is 730 CU-hours, which is $77.38 on Launch and $162.06 on Scale.

Does Neon charge when the database is idle?

Not if it scales to zero. Neon suspends compute "after 5 minutes" of inactivity, and "once you query the database again, it reactivates automatically within a few hundred milliseconds" (scale to zero docs). A suspended compute adds no CU-hours. Storage keeps billing.

Three things keep a compute awake:

• You turned scale to zero off. Paid plans can, for an always-active compute.
• Something queries it every few minutes. A health check, a cron job or a worker polling a table resets the 5-minute timer.
• It's bigger than 16 CU, or Neon is replicating from it. Computes over 16 CU "remain always active," and logical replication from Neon keeps the compute up while subscribers are connected.

A production database for an app with steady traffic rarely sleeps. That's why the three always-on presets above are the realistic ones for a live app.

Is Neon free?

Yes, for small databases that sleep. The Free plan gives each project 100 CU-hours, 1 GB of storage and 5 GB of egress a month, for up to 100 projects and 20 GB of storage in total (pricing). 100 CU-hours runs the smallest compute for 400 hours, about 13 hours a day.

Scale to zero can't be turned off on Free, and compute stops at 2 CU. When a project runs out of CU-hours or egress, Neon suspends its compute until the next month. Past 1 GB in a project, or 20 GB across all of them, writes that add data fail. The plans docs say your data isn't deleted either way.

The Free plan's limits don't carry over: when you upgrade, paid usage is metered from zero. The side project preset fits in Free, and would cost $3.41 on Launch. For Supabase's free tier, with its 500 MB database and pausing rule, see is Supabase free.

What does a Neon database cost per month?

With my assumptions, $3.41 for a side project that sleeps, $21.20 for a small always-on database, $87.18 at 1 CU and $203.76 when it's busy, all on Launch. Scale costs about 1.8 to 2 times as much, because compute is the biggest line: it's 89% of the 1 CU bill on Launch.

The four databases, as averages over a 730-hour month:

• Side project: 0.25 CU awake 4 hours a day, 0.5 GB of data, 1-day restore window.
• Small: 0.25 CU always on, 5 GB of data, 1-day window.
• Medium: 1 CU always on, 20 GB of data, 7-day window.
• Busy: 2 CU always on, 100 GB of data, 7-day window.

These are assumptions, not measurements. Restore history is my estimate: a tenth of the data changes each day, times the days in the window. All four stay under 500 GB of egress and within the branch allowance. Past those, egress is $0.10 per GB, so a 1 TB month adds $50, and each branch past the allowance adds $1.50.

Why is my Neon bill higher than expected?

Usually because the compute never sleeps. A database that should be idle at night but gets a query every few minutes bills 730 hours a month instead of a few hundred. Take the side project above and keep it awake all month: the bill goes from $3.41 to $19.53 on Launch.

The usual causes, in the order I'd check them:

• Something keeps the compute awake. Health checks, cron jobs and polling workers all count as activity.
• Autoscaling went higher than you think. You pay for the average size, so a compute that sits at 2 CU during the day doubles the 1 CU line.
• Restore history. Changes are billed at $0.20 per GB-month for as long as your window keeps them. A 30-day window on a busy database is 30 days of changes.
• Old branches. Branches past the allowance are $1.50 each a month, and a branch you keep writing to bills storage up to its full size.
• Branch computes. Each branch has its own compute, and it bills CU-hours whenever it's awake.
• Egress past 500 GB per project, at $0.10 per GB.

Is Neon cheaper than Supabase?

For a small database that sleeps, yes. For a small database that's always on, Neon on Launch is a few dollars cheaper, but Supabase's extra disk costs less. Supabase Pro is $25 a month with $10 of compute credits, enough for a Micro instance with 1 GB of RAM on shared CPU, and 8 GB of disk per project (Supabase pricing).

The small database above, with 1 GB of RAM, costs $21.20 a month on Neon Launch. On Supabase Pro, the same size is the $25 plan fee, because Micro is covered by the credit and 5 GB fits in the 8 GB of disk. Past 8 GB, Supabase charges $0.125 per GB of disk against Neon's $0.35. Supabase's plan also bundles file storage and realtime with the database; Neon includes auth and bills object storage by the GB. My full side-by-side is in Neon vs Supabase, and Supabase's plans are in my Supabase pricing breakdown.

Is Neon cheaper than your own server?

For a database that sleeps, no: the side project costs $0 on Free and $3.41 on Launch, and the smallest server is $7. For a database that's always on, yes. The small database is $21.20 on Neon against $7.09 on a Hetzner CX23, the 1 CU database is $87.18 against $10.59 on a CX33, and the busy one is $203.76 against about $30 on a Netcup VPS 2000.

All prices are before VAT; Netcup's VPS 500 is €9.50 with German VAT. Hetzner's are after its 15 June 2026 increase, its second of the year. The CX line is only in Germany and Finland, and on 8 October 2026 Hetzner's Cost-Optimized page listed every CX size as "not available", so check stock before you plan on one. For US users, Netcup has a datacenter in Manassas, Virginia; its listed prices are for "no preference Europe", and picking a specific datacenter can cost more.

I sized each server to hold the compute size in RAM with room for the OS, and twice the data on disk. The busy database needs 200 GB of disk, which is why Hetzner jumps to the CX53. A shared vCPU isn't the same as Neon's CPU, so don't compare them one to one. A small app usually fits on the same server too, which the Neon column doesn't include.

What the server price doesn't include:

• Backups need a second server. Ployz mirrors the database's volume onto it and syncs when you ask, and a sync sends only what changed.
• No scale to zero. A server costs the same at 3 a.m. as at noon.
• No branching with data. Neon branches a database with its data; on a server, a copy is a dump and a restore.
• Upkeep is yours. Postgres upgrades and disk space.

Why does an always-on database cost so much on usage pricing?

Because a database's job is to stay up and hold its data in memory, and usage pricing charges for exactly that. On Neon, a 2 CU database with 8 GB of RAM running all month is $154.76 of compute on Launch and $324.12 on Scale, before storage. A Hetzner CX43 with 16 GB of RAM is $18.49.

That's what happened to me on Railway. I paid $500+ a month at one point, and the bill went up every month. Most of it was the database: it was hit hard, it grew, and a busy database on usage pricing isn't cheap. Today one dedicated server at €80 a month runs more than I ever ran on Railway. My Railway pricing breakdown has the numbers.

Neon is a better deal than that for databases that sleep. For databases that don't, the meter runs all month.

How do you keep a Neon bill down?

Let it sleep, keep the restore window short, and delete branches you're done with.

• Let it scale to zero. Move health checks to your app, not the database, and batch cron jobs so they don't wake it every few minutes.
• Cap autoscaling. Set the maximum compute size to what the database needs, since you pay for the average.
• Shorten the restore window. The default on paid plans is 1 day. Every extra day keeps another day of changes at $0.20 per GB-month.
• Delete old branches. Past the allowance they're $1.50 each a month, and their storage grows with every write, up to a full copy.
• Set a spending notification. It emails you at 80% and 100% of your threshold. It doesn't stop anything.

Neon or your own server?

Stay on Neon if your database sleeps most of the day, you want branches with copies of your data for every pull request, or you need point-in-time restore without building it. The side project above costs $0 on Free and $3.41 on Launch.

Pick your own server if your database is awake all day. An always-on database costs $21 to $204 a month on Neon Launch in my examples, and $7 to $36 on a rented server, with room for your app on the same machine.

Where Ployz fits

I built Ployz after that Railway bill, to keep the platform experience and drop the meter. Postgres 18 is one click, with a 5 GB volume by default, a sealed generated password and a DATABASE_URL your app connects to with ${{ postgres.DATABASE_URL }}. Push to GitHub and it builds and deploys your app on the same server.

ployz up --server root@your-server

That installs Ployz on a Linux server, builds the current directory and gives it an HTTPS address.

If your database sleeps, Neon is the better deal and Ployz won't beat $0. If it's awake all day, a rented server with Ployz is the cheaper home for it. Start free on your own server.

FAQ

How much does Neon cost per month?

$0 on Free, and on Launch or Scale whatever you use, with no monthly fee. In my examples, a database that sleeps most of the day costs $3.41 on Launch, a small always-on one $21.20, a 1 CU one $87.18 and a busy one $203.76.

Is Neon completely free?

Free is free, with limits: 100 CU-hours, 1 GB of storage and 5 GB of egress per project each month, for up to 100 projects and 20 GB of storage in total. When a project runs out of CU-hours, its compute suspends until next month; your data stays.

What is the cheapest always-on Neon database?

$19.35 a month of compute on Launch, for 0.25 CU running all 730 hours, plus $0.35 per GB of storage. On Scale, the same compute is $40.52.

What's the difference between Neon Launch and Scale?

Scale charges $0.222 per CU-hour instead of $0.106 and adds a 30-day restore window, 25 branches per project, an uptime SLA, private networking, IP Allow and HIPAA. Storage, history and egress cost the same on both.

Is Neon cheaper than Supabase?

For a database that sleeps, yes, because Neon Free and Launch only bill the hours it runs. For a small always-on database, Neon Launch is about $21 against Supabase Pro's $25, and Supabase's fee also covers 8 GB of disk, file storage and realtime.

Does Neon have cold starts?

Yes, when a compute has scaled to zero. Neon says it "reactivates automatically within a few hundred milliseconds" on the next query. On paid plans you can turn scale to zero off and pay for every hour instead.

Is Neon cheaper than Postgres on your own server?

Only if your database sleeps. Always on, the 1 CU database costs $87.18 a month on Neon Launch and $10.59 on a Hetzner CX33. The server doesn't include branching.

How I checked

Prices were checked on 8 October 2026 on Neon's pricing page, plans docs and scale to zero docs, and on Supabase's pricing page. Hetzner's and Netcup's prices were checked the same day on their own pages, linked next to each number. The euro conversion for Netcup is approximate. The database sizes, the daily change rate and the restore history estimate are assumptions, not measurements from my account. I build Ployz, which competes with Neon for always-on databases, so the maths is all here to check.

Run Postgres next to your app on your own server with Ployz, free: get started.