Neon always-free tier: $0, no time limits

Neon’s Free plan is $0 with, in their words, “no time limits and no credit card required.” It is an always-free tier: no trial clock, no signup credit, and no card. The quotas are per project and per month, and when you exhaust them compute suspends until the next period rather than billing you. Checked against the official pricing and plans pages on 2026-09-02.

What the free plan includes

Up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, and per project each month: 100 compute-unit hours and 0.5 GB of storage, plus 5 GB of data transfer per month. A 0.25 CU compute running steadily maps to roughly 400 hours per month inside the 100 CU-hour budget, which is Neon’s own framing of the allowance. Compute autoscales up to 2 CU and scales to zero after 5 minutes of idle; on the Free plan you cannot disable scale-to-zero.

The hard edges

Two limits behave differently and are worth separating. Run out of CU-hours or data transfer, and compute is suspended until the next period. Exceed 0.5 GB of storage, and writes fail. The first is a pause; the second is an error in your application, so watch storage more closely than hours.

Correction: no confirmed upgrade credit

A $20 upgrade credit circulates in third-party writeups about Neon. It is not confirmed on the official pages as of 2026-09-02, so I am not publishing it. Neon’s startup program, offering up to $100k, is a separate application-based program and not part of the free plan.

Choose or skip

Choose Neon Free if you want real Postgres with branching for side projects and can fit each database in 0.5 GB. Skip it if your data will outgrow that cap soon, since the failure mode is failed writes rather than a bill.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.

The nearest neighbor is the Supabase free tier, a fuller backend with a weekly inactivity pause instead of per-project CU budgets. For hosting the app in front of the database, see the Render free tier, or read how to choose compute. Every grant I track is on the credits index.