If your mental model of Neon's free tier is "one project, ~190 compute hours, 10 branches", that shape is gone. The pricing page now lists the free plan as: up to 100 projects, each with 100 compute-unit-hours per month and 0.5 GB of storage, compute sizes up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM), no credit card.
Two consequences fall out of that, one nice and one that will bite somebody.
The nice one: per-tenant and per-PR databases stopped being a paid-plan feature. A hundred isolated projects at 0.5 GB each is a lot of preview environments, staging copies, and one-database-per-customer experiments for $0.
The one that bites: a single always-on database no longer fits. The smallest compute is 0.25 CU, and a 30-day month is 720 hours — keeping one database awake around the clock costs about 180 CU-hours, against an allowance of 100 per project. Scale-to-zero is doing the real work in that budget: the allowance only drains while the database is awake, so a hobby app with idle nights is fine, but anything that pins the compute awake (an aggressive connection pool, a cron that fires every few minutes, an uptime monitor pinging your API which queries the db) will run a project dry partway through the month.
So the free plan got better for the many-small-databases pattern and quietly stopped covering the one-database-that-never-sleeps pattern. Which side of that line you're on is worth knowing before the end-of-month surprise.
Side-by-side of Neon against Supabase's free Postgres: https://toolfreebie.com/supabase-vs-neon/
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