Neon Has a Free Serverless PostgreSQL — Database Branching Like Git for Development

Neon Has Free Serverless PostgreSQL With Git-Like Branching

RDS costs money even when idle. Neon scales to zero — and lets you branch your database like git branches for development.

What Makes Neon Different

• Serverless — scales to zero, pay only when active
• Branching — create database copies in seconds for dev/test
• Autoscaling — scales compute up and down automatically
• PostgreSQL compatible — standard Postgres, any driver works
• Instant restore — point-in-time recovery to any second
• Connection pooling — built-in pgbouncer

Quick Start

# Create a project at console.neon.tech
# Get connection string

# Connect with any Postgres client
psql postgresql://user:[e-mail]/dbname

# Branch for development
neonctl branches create --name feature-auth
# Full database copy in <1 second!

Use in Code

import { neon } from '@neondatabase/serverless'

const sql = neon(process.env.DATABASE_URL)

const users = await sql`SELECT * FROM users WHERE active = true`

Free Tier

Resource	Free
Storage	0.5 GB
Compute	191 hours/month
Branches	10
Projects	1

Why Neon Over RDS/Supabase

1. Scale to zero — no cost when idle
2. Branching — instant DB copies for development
3. Serverless driver — works from edge functions over HTTP
4. Instant restore — any point in time
5. Free tier — 191 compute hours is generous

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📧 [e-mail] — Database architecture consulting

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