Free Postgres hosting in 2026: every option tested or verified
Published 2026-10-07
TESTED — measured, not copied from pricing pages
“Free Postgres hosting” returns a graveyard of outdated listicles. Half the options they recommend no longer have free tiers. We checked every provider’s official pricing this week, and measured the two leading options ourselves from India.
The field in 2026
| Provider | Recurring free tier? | Storage | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | ✅ Yes | 500 MB × 2 projects | Pauses after 7 days idle |
| Neon | ✅ Yes | 1 GB × project (20 GB cap) | 100 CU-hours compute/month |
| Aiven | ✅ Yes | 1 GB | Powered off when idle |
| Prisma Postgres | ✅ Yes | 1.01 GB | 200K operations/month, no backups |
| CockroachDB | ❌ Dead for new orgs (Sept 2026) | — | Trial-only now; legacy users grandfathered |
| Xata | ❌ Dead (pivot) | — | 14-day trial only; old free tier gone |
| Render Postgres | ❌ Not really | 1 GB | Expires after 30 days, then deleted |
| Vercel Postgres | ❌ Doesn’t exist | — | Marketplace resells Neon/Supabase |
Three “free Postgres” options died or pivoted recently — CockroachDB killed its famous free serverless tier for new orgs in September 2026, Xata pivoted away entirely, and Render’s free Postgres was always a 30-day countdown. If a blog post recommends any of these, check its publish date.
What we measured (Supabase vs Neon)
We created free projects on both and ran the same connect/query benchmark from a machine in India. Full method and numbers in our detailed comparison; summary:
| Supabase (Mumbai) | Neon (Singapore) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cold start after idle | 495 ms | 1,242 ms |
| Warm connect + query | 238 ms | 431 ms |
| Hot query | 5 ms | 58 ms |
The 10x hot-query gap is geography: Supabase has a Mumbai region, Neon’s closest is Singapore. For Indian users this dominates every other consideration.
One trap we hit ourselves: Supabase direct connections are IPv6-only. On a typical IPv4-only Indian ISP you must use the session pooler connection string or nothing connects at all.
The four survivors, honestly
Supabase — pick if you want a backend, not just a database
500 MB Postgres plus auth (50K users), file storage, and edge functions. Mumbai region. The 7-day pause is the gotcha — a GitHub Actions cron pinging it weekly keeps it alive. No backups on free.
Neon — pick for branching and bigger storage
1 GB per project and database branching (branch → migrate → test → merge, like git). The 5-minute scale-to-zero can’t be disabled, so sporadic traffic pays a ~1.2 s cold start every time. Run out of the 100 monthly CU-hours and your compute suspends until next month — data safe, app down.
Aiven — pick if you want a real VM
The only free tier that’s a dedicated instance (1 CPU/1 GB RAM) rather than shared/serverless, and the only one that mentions backups. Costs: 20-connection cap with no pooling, an idle power-off policy, and Aiven explicitly reserves the right to change your region or config at any time.
Prisma Postgres — pick for multi-project tinkering
50 databases under one free account and unlimited data transfer. But every single query counts against 200K operations/month — a chatty ORM in a moderately used app exceeds that — and there are no backups at any price below $10/month.
Decision shortcuts
- Users in India → Supabase (Mumbai, 5 ms — nothing else is close)
- Need DB branches for safe migrations → Neon
- Want a traditional always-on-ish instance with backups → Aiven
- Many small experiments → Prisma Postgres (50 DBs)
- Production app earning money → none of these. A $5-6/month VPS running Postgres in Docker, or a paid tier of any provider above. Free tiers pause, suspend, power off, and cap — all four of them, by design.
The meta-lesson
Half of this list died in the last 24 months (the graveyard has the full history). The survivors share a pattern: free tiers that cost the provider almost nothing when idle (scale-to-zero, pausing, power-off). That’s the deal now — free Postgres means interruptible Postgres. Design for it: keep your schema in migrations, your data exportable with pg_dump, and your provider swappable.
All limits verified against official pricing pages on 2026-10-06. Latency measured by us — method and script here. When any of these tiers change, our tracked pages update first.