Neon free tier: the verified facts
Last verified: 2026-10-06· official pricing page
FREE TIER EXISTS NO CARD NEEDED
Serverless Postgres with branching — scale-to-zero free tier.
Current limits
| What | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Projects | 100 projects | |
| Storage | 1 GB per project | 20 GB total across all projects |
| Compute | 100 CU-hours/project/month | = 400 hours of a 0.25 CU compute |
| Autoscaling | Up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM) | |
| Branches | 10 per project | |
| Egress | 5 GB per project/month | |
| Scale to zero | After 5 min idle | Cannot be disabled on free plan |
| Instant restore | 6-hour history | Capped at 1 GB of changes |
| Auth (Better Auth) | 60,000 MAU |
Gotchas that bite people
Compute suspends after 5 minutes idle (not configurable on free) — first query after idle pays a cold-start penalty; we measured ~1.2s from India to Singapore
Run out of CU-hours or egress mid-month and your compute is SUSPENDED until the next billing period — data survives, app goes down
Exceeding the 1 GB storage cap makes writes fail (inserts/updates/deletes) until you free space or upgrade
Serverless runtimes (Vercel/Workers) must use the pooled connection string or they exhaust connections fast
Notes for developers in India
Singapore region (ap-southeast-1) is closest — we measured ~58ms hot query latency from India. No India region yet.
Change history
2026-10-06— Verified against official plans doc: storage is 1 GB/project (20 GB account total), compute 100 CU-hours/project/month, autoscaling to 2 CU. Older third-party posts citing '512 MB per branch' are outdated.
Outgrowing the free tier?
When the limits above stop being enough, see our comparison guides for the cheapest reliable upgrade paths — including options with India regions.