Neon

Neon gives you serverless Postgres that scales to zero when nobody's using it and branches like git. That branching is the killer feature: spin up a full copy of your database for testing or development in seconds, no storage duplication. The architecture separates compute from storage, so the database shuts down completely when idle and cold-starts in under a second. Apache 2.0 on the open source side. Databricks acquired Neon in 2025 and folded it into their Lakebase product, but the managed Neon service and the open source engine both keep running.

Self-hosting the open source version means running the storage engine, the compute layer, and the control plane yourself. That is real infrastructure work and most people will never do it. The managed service is the point.

Pricing got significantly better after the acquisition. The free tier is now 100 compute-hours and 0.5 GB storage per project, no card required, enough for a side project. Launch is pay-as-you-go at $0.106 per compute-hour and $0.35 per GB-month, so a small 10 GB app runs a few dollars a month instead of the old flat $19. Scale adds longer history, private networking, and HIPAA. Solo devs: free tier. Small teams: Launch. Larger teams: compare against RDS or self-hosted Postgres.

The catch: it's still Postgres, with Postgres's limits, and the cold start after idle adds latency to the first query. You're also now betting on a database owned by Databricks, so the roadmap follows their priorities, not yours.