Supabase pauses idle free projects; Neon scales them to zero — not the same thing

Both free Postgres tiers stop your database when nobody's using it. The mechanics are opposite, and it changes what you can build.

Supabase pauses a free project after ~a week of inactivity, and un-pausing is a manual dashboard action. A visitor arriving at your dormant side project hits errors until you notice and click resume.

Neon scales compute to zero after minutes of idle, and the next connection wakes it automatically in a few hundred milliseconds. Dormancy is invisible apart from a slow first query.

So for an app with sporadic traffic — a portfolio demo someone opens twice a month — Neon's model survives unattended; Supabase's needs you on call as the resume button. Supabase pays that back with the integrated auth/storage/realtime stack once traffic is regular.

The full free-tier comparison including storage and branching: https://toolfreebie.com/supabase-vs-neon/