Neon vs Supabase: which is cheaper in 2026?

TL;DR: Neon is cheaper when your database sits idle most of the day: a 1 GB RAM database awake four hours a day costs $3.92 a month on Neon Launch and $25 on Supabase Pro. Supabase is cheaper once the database is busy around the clock: 4 GB of RAM running 24/7 costs $81 on Supabase and $84.38 on Neon. On a rented Hetzner server either one is about $7.

• Pick Neon if your database is idle most of the day, or you want a branch with real data for every pull request.
• Pick Supabase if you want auth, file storage and realtime next to Postgres, or your database is busy 24/7.
• Pick your own server if the database runs all day and the compute line is $50 a month or more.
• Pick Ployz, which I build, if you want one-click Postgres next to your app on that server, mirrored to a second server for backups.

Sources: Neon pricing, Supabase pricing, Supabase compute. Egress is extra past 500 GB on Neon and 250 GB on Supabase.

What is the difference between Neon and Supabase?

Neon is a Postgres database that bills by the hour and scales to zero when idle. Supabase is a backend platform built around an always-on Postgres. Auth, file storage, realtime, Edge Functions and an auto-generated REST API sit next to the database.

So the real question is how many hours a day your database does work. Neon charges for every hour your compute is awake. Supabase charges a fixed monthly price per compute size, whether anyone queries it or not.

If you want a Postgres URL and nothing else, compare Neon with the Supabase database alone. If you use Supabase Auth and Storage, Neon replaces only part of it.

Neon now has some of the bundle too. Its Managed Better Auth is included on every plan: up to 60,000 monthly active users on Free and up to 1 million on Launch and Scale (Neon Auth docs). Supabase includes 50,000 MAU on Free and 100,000 on Pro, then charges $0.00325 per MAU (Supabase pricing). Neon's plans don't list file storage or realtime. Supabase includes both.

Databricks bought Neon in May 2025 for about $1 billion (SiliconANGLE). Neon still runs as its own product with its own pricing.

Sources: Neon plans, Neon branching, Supabase compute, Supabase branching, Supabase connections.

What would your database cost on Neon, Supabase or your own server?

Pick the app closest to yours, or customize the RAM, active hours, data and egress. Supabase moves you up a size if your data is bigger than it recommends for the size you picked. The server row is the cheapest Hetzner server with the same RAM and twice your data in disk.

At 24 active hours the Neon rows assume a fixed size. With autoscaling on, Neon bills the size you used each moment. So a database that idles at 0.25 CU and spikes to 2 CU costs less than 2 CU all day.

How does Neon pricing work?

Neon has a Free plan and two pay-as-you-go plans, Launch and Scale, with no monthly minimum on either (Neon plans). You pay for compute in CU-hours. One CU is about 4 GB of RAM. It costs $0.106 per CU-hour on Launch and $0.222 on Scale. Storage is $0.35 per GB-month on both. Each project includes 500 GB of egress, then $0.10 per GB.

A CU-hour is compute size times hours running. Neon's own example: 0.25 CU for 4 hours is 1 CU-hour, and 2 CU for 3 hours is 6 (usage metrics). The smallest compute is 0.25 CU, about 1 GB of RAM.

Source: Neon pricing, Neon plans.

One CU running all month is 730 CU-hours. That's $77.38 on Launch and $162.06 on Scale. The smallest 0.25 CU, always on, is $19.35 on Launch.

Some older comparisons say you need the Scale plan to keep Neon always on. Today's docs say Launch can disable scale to zero (scale to zero).

How does Supabase pricing compare?

Supabase Pro is $25 a month and includes $10 of compute credit. The credit covers one Micro database (1 GB RAM, shared CPU). Bigger sizes have fixed monthly prices: Small $15, Medium $60, Large $110, XL $210 (compute docs). Pro includes 8 GB of disk ($0.125 per GB after) and 250 GB of egress ($0.09 per GB after). Compute runs 24/7.

Source: Supabase compute and disk. The full breakdown, including MAU, PITR and why disk grows on its own, is in my Supabase pricing article.

Always on, Neon Launch costs about $19 per GB of RAM a month. Supabase's sizes cost $7.50 to $15 per GB. So at 24/7 Supabase is cheaper at every size, and Neon wins on hours, not on rate.

What do Neon and Supabase cost for a real app?

Here are four worked bills from the calculator above. Neon wins the side project by a lot. The always-on SaaS is close to a tie. At 16 GB always on, Supabase is cheaper than Neon Launch. The Hetzner server is the cheapest in every row, before you count the work of running it.

On Neon Scale, the bigger app costs $733.24. Hetzner prices are from its 15 June 2026 price adjustment (Germany/Finland, excluding VAT), plus $0.60 for IPv4 (primary IPs). For the bigger app I picked a server with twice the RAM. The CCX23 doesn't have the disk for a 100 GB database plus dumps.

Netcup is the other provider I'd look at, and it's often the better deal. Its VPS 500 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD, traffic included) is €8.26 a month incl. VAT on a 12-month term. Picking its Manassas datacenter, in the US, adds about €1 a month (netcup VPS).

Is Neon faster than Supabase?

I don't know of an independent benchmark that runs the same workload on comparable Neon and Supabase sizes. So I won't claim one is faster. Both run standard Postgres. Speed on a warm database comes from RAM, CPU and how close the database is to your app.

Here's what I'd check before picking:

• Region. Put the database in the same region as your app. Neon publishes a regional latency tracker with scale to zero disabled. A wrong region costs more than either platform's overhead.
• CPU. Supabase sizes below Large share the CPU. Neon's CU includes "associated CPU", with no dedicated-core figure on the plans page.
• Connections. Neon's PgBouncer pooler takes up to 10,000 client connections. Direct max_connections is 104 at 0.25 CU and 419 at 1 CU (Neon pooling). Supabase Micro allows 60 direct connections and 200 pooler clients. If you run serverless functions, Neon's pooler has more room at the small sizes.
• Transaction-mode limits. Both poolers in transaction mode break session features like LISTEN/NOTIFY, temporary tables and session advisory locks. Run migrations and pg_dump over the direct connection on both.

When should you run Postgres on your own server instead?

Run it yourself when the database is busy all day and you use Neon or Supabase mostly as a Postgres URL. At that point you pay $80 to $400 a month for compute that costs $7 to $165 on a rented server. If the database is idle most of the day, Neon's scale to zero is cheaper than any server.

I learned this the expensive way. On Railway I paid over $500 a month. Most of it was a database that was hit hard and used a lot of gigabytes. Today one dedicated server at €80 a month runs everything I have, including far more database than I ever ran on Railway.

What you give up is real:

My opinion: the platform markup only goes one way. Coding agents are getting good at the boring server work, like adding a server, deploying and watching a disk. Paying several times the hardware price for a database that never sleeps makes less sense every year. For the wider picture across hosting platforms, see PaaS pricing compared.

Neon, Supabase or your own server?

Pick Neon if:

• Your database is idle most of the day: side projects, internal tools, dev and staging databases.
• You want a database branch with real data for every pull request.
• You run serverless functions and want a big pooler at small sizes.
• You only need Postgres, maybe with auth.

Pick Supabase if:

• You want auth, file storage, realtime and a REST API in one place.
• Your database is busy 24/7, where Supabase's fixed price per GB of RAM beats Neon's hourly rate.
• You don't want cold starts or to think about active hours.

Pick your own server if:

• The database runs all day and the compute line is $50 a month or more.
• Your app already runs on a server, so Postgres can sit next to it on a private network.

Where Ployz fits

Ployz runs your app and its database on servers you rent. It's free on your own servers.

Ployz also adds and removes servers, and keeps a mirror of the database on another one, synced when you ask. If the first server dies, restore from the mirror, or move the database onto that server with seconds of downtime.

Ployz Postgres doesn't scale to zero or branch with data. If you need those, Neon is the better fit.

FAQ

Which free tier is better, Neon or Supabase?

Neon's free tier is better for many small projects, and Supabase's is better for one app that needs auth and storage. Neon Free gives 100 projects, each with 100 CU-hours, 1 GB of storage and 5 GB of egress. It scales to zero after 5 minutes. Supabase Free gives two active projects with a 500 MB database, 5 GB of egress and 50,000 MAU. It pauses a project after a week of inactivity (Supabase pricing).

100 CU-hours at the smallest 0.25 CU size is 400 hours of activity, about 13 hours a day (Neon plans). That's plenty for a side project that gets visited during the day. Supabase's pause after a week idle is what bites demo apps nobody opens for a while. I wrote more about that in is Supabase free.

How long are Neon cold starts?

Neon cold starts take about half a second. Neon's docs say a compute that scaled to zero "reactivates automatically within a few hundred milliseconds" (scale to zero). Neon's engineering blog put typical cold starts at about 500 ms in July 2023, down from 3 to 6 seconds, and said they vary by region (Neon blog). I haven't measured this myself.

Half a second is fine for an admin panel or a cron job. It's noticeable on the first page load of a public site. You can turn scale to zero off on Launch, but then you pay for 730 hours and Neon stops being the cheap option. Or you can keep the database warm with traffic. Supabase has no cold start on paid plans because the compute never stops.

Which has better database branching?

Neon has better branching. Its branches are copy-on-write clones that include your data and are created instantly. You pay only for the changes a branch makes (Neon branching, usage metrics). Supabase branches start schema-only by default and run on their own Micro compute at $0.01344 an hour, which compute credits don't cover (Supabase branching billing).

For preview environments per pull request, that's a real difference. A Neon branch that idles costs storage deltas and scales to zero. A Supabase branch left running all month costs about $10 in compute. It has seed data, not production data, unless you choose to include data.

What are the downsides of Supabase and Neon?

Supabase's main downside is that you pay for compute 24/7, even when nobody uses the app. Resizing a compute takes the database down, usually for under 2 minutes, so Supabase never upgrades a size on its own (compute docs). Branch compute isn't covered by compute credits or the Spend Cap (branching billing).

Neon's main downside is the cold start after 5 idle minutes. Its hourly rate also works out higher per GB of RAM than Supabase when the database runs all day. Neon has no file storage or realtime, so you add those yourself.

Is Neon cheaper than Supabase?

Neon is cheaper unless the database is busy nearly all day. For a database with 4 GB of RAM and 20 GB of data, Neon Launch stays cheaper up to about 23 active hours a day. At 12 hours a day, the business-hours tool above costs $45.69 on Neon and $81 on Supabase. At 24 hours a day it's $84.38 against $81, and Supabase wins at bigger sizes.

How I checked

I checked prices on 2026-10-08 on Neon's and Supabase's pricing pages and docs, linked next to each number. The Supabase figures match my Supabase pricing breakdown. Hetzner prices are from its 15 June 2026 price adjustment, for Germany and Finland, excluding VAT, plus $0.60 for IPv4. Netcup's price is from its VPS page. The worked bills come from the calculator on this page. I haven't benchmarked either platform or measured Neon cold starts myself. I build Ployz, which is mentioned in this article as one option.

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