Neon Pricing 2026: CU-Hours, Storage and the Free Plan

Neon has no monthly fee on any plan. Free gives each project 100 CU-hours of compute and 1 GB of storage, Launch bills $0.106 per CU-hour and Scale $0.222, and both paid plans charge $0.35 per GB-month of storage. A small database that sleeps when idle lands near $15 a month on Launch; Scale doubles the compute line for SLAs and compliance.

All prices below are as of Oct 2026, verified on vendor pages: Neon's pricing page and its plans documentation. A CU, or compute unit, is Neon's measure of database size: about 4 GB of RAM with matching CPU. A CU-hour is one CU running for one hour, so a 0.25 CU database awake for four hours uses one CU-hour.

Toolradar data: the managed databases ranking on Toolradar, the software directory we run, evaluated 24 tools as of October 2026, and it names Neon and Aurora Serverless v2 as its pay-per-use serverless examples, set against provisioned databases with a fixed monthly cost. The record for the product is Neon on Toolradar, and the long-form writeup on this site is the Neon review.

Plan	Price	Best for	What changes the bill
Free	$0	Prototypes, demos and many small side projects	Compute suspends when the monthly hours run out; writes fail when storage is full
Launch	$0.106 per CU-hour, $0.35 per GB-month	A production app that can tolerate no SLA	Hours awake, autoscaling ceiling, storage, extra branches
Scale	$0.222 per CU-hour, $0.35 per GB-month	Teams that need SLAs, HIPAA, private networking	The same meters at a higher compute rate
Agent, startup and open source programs	Custom rates or credits	App-generation platforms, funded startups, maintainers	A sales or application process

How Neon bills: compute hours, not instances

Neon charges for the hours your database actually runs, multiplied by its size. The pricing page gives the formula: monthly CU-hours equal the average CU size times the hours the compute runs, and the bill is that figure times your plan's rate. When a database goes idle it scales to zero and the meter stops.

That model rewards workloads that sleep. A staging database used during the working day pays for those hours only, while a provisioned server would bill all 730 hours of the month. It punishes the opposite case less than people expect, but it does punish it: once you disable scale to zero, the smallest size of 0.25 CU sets a floor of about 182.5 CU-hours a month, which Neon's own FAQ spells out.

Autoscaling is the other lever. Each compute can rise between a minimum and maximum size you set, and the pricing page calls that maximum a built-in cost ceiling, since the database never scales past it during a spike. Set it low on anything that is not production, and you have a hard upper bound on the compute line before the month starts.

What five real workloads cost on Launch and Scale

Neon publishes five workload profiles on its pricing page, from a database that sleeps most of the day to one running between 6 and 14 CU. We priced each profile on both paid plans using only the published compute and storage rates. Neon's own "typical spend" figures, $15 for intermittent load on Launch and $701 for high load on Scale, match this math.

Workload (Neon's profile)	CU-hours a month	Storage	Launch	Scale
Intermittent, scales to zero	140	1 GB	$15.19	$31.43
Low, always on near the minimum size	190	5 GB	$21.89	$43.93
Medium, 0.5 to 4 CU	720	10 GB	$79.82	$163.34
High, 3 to 7 CU	3,000	100 GB	$353.00	$701.00
XL, 6 to 14 CU	6,000	1,000 GB	$986.00	$1,682.00

Scale's compute rate is 2.09 times Launch's, so the gap widens as compute grows. At the high-load profile the difference is $348 a month, or $4,176 over a year, for the same database doing the same work. At the XL profile storage is a large share of the bill, $350 on both plans, so the multiplier bites less in percentage terms.

These totals leave out the meters covered further down: instant restore history, extra branches, egress past the included allowance, snapshots, and the Functions and Object Storage products. For most single-database apps those lines are cents or a few dollars. For a team that opens a branch per pull request, they are not.

The Free plan: generous on projects, strict on hours

Free gives you 100 projects, each with its own 100 CU-hours a month, and the allowance resets every billing period. The pricing page says that at the default 0.25 CU size, that allowance covers about 400 hours of active compute, more than half the hours in a month. A demo or a side project that wakes for a few hours a day stays free indefinitely.

The limits are hard, not billed. According to the plans documentation, running out of CU-hours or public network transfer suspends the compute until the next billing period or an upgrade. Going past 1 GB of storage in a project, or 20 GB across all your Free projects, makes inserts, updates and deletes fail until you free space. Neon says none of these limits delete data.

Two more details shape what Free is good for. Scale to zero is always on, with computes suspending after 5 minutes idle, and it cannot be turned off, so a Free database always pays a cold start after a quiet spell. Each project also gets 10 branches, 5 GB of egress, a 6-hour restore window, one manual snapshot and one day of monitoring history.

Upgrading resets the meter rather than stacking allowances. Neon's FAQ says Free quotas do not carry into paid plans: on Launch, compute and storage bill from the first CU-hour. A project that used 80 free CU-hours a month will cost about $8.48 on Launch at that same usage, plus storage, which is small but not zero.

Launch vs Scale: what the doubled rate buys

Launch is the plan most apps should start on. It allows sizes up to 16 CU (64 GB of RAM), 100 projects, 10 branches per project, a restore window of up to 7 days, and 3 days of metrics and logs in the console. Scale to zero is on by default and can be disabled, and billing support is included.

Scale exists for buyers whose contract or security review asks for something Launch cannot show. The pricing page lists SLAs, HIPAA, private networking and SOC 2 report access, plus sizes up to 56 CU (224 GB of RAM), 1,000 projects, 25 branches per project, a 30-day restore window, 14 days of monitoring, and metrics and logs export to Datadog or OpenTelemetry.

Pay for Scale when compliance or the restore window is a requirement, not for headroom. A database that fits under 16 CU runs the same on Launch at half the compute rate. If the reason to move is a single audit document, compare the yearly gap from the workload table against what the audit is worth to the deal. Higher-volume customers can ask sales about annual commits, which the docs mention without a published discount.

Storage, history and branches: the lines below the compute rate

Storage costs the same per GB-month on both paid plans, measured hourly and unlimited in size. A 50 GB production database adds $17.50 a month. Root branches bill on their logical data size, and a child branch bills on the smaller of its accumulated changes or its full size, so a fresh branch inside the history window costs nothing extra.

History is a separate meter at $0.20 per GB-month. It covers the write-ahead log Neon keeps so you can restore a branch to a past point or query an old state. Paid projects default to a 1-day window. A write-heavy app that sets the window to 7 days keeps far more log, and the pricing page advises shortening the window if you do not need deep recovery.

Branches are where preview workflows add up. Launch includes 10 per project and Scale 25, and each extra branch costs $1.50 per branch-month, prorated hourly at about $0.002 an hour. A team that keeps 25 open preview branches on Launch all month pays $22.50 for the 15 extra, before those branches burn any compute. Branch expiration and an API cleanup job keep that line near zero.

A branch that ages out of the history window becomes as expensive as a root branch, because it no longer shares storage with its parent. That is the quiet cost of a long-lived feature branch on a busy database. Reset it from the parent regularly, or delete it once the pull request merges.

Egress, snapshots and the newer products

Each paid project includes 500 GB of public network transfer a month, then $0.10 per GB. An API that serves 1 TB of query results in a month pays $50 for the overage. Scale also bills private network transfer at $0.01 per GB, which only applies once you use Private Link.

Snapshots cost $0.09 per GB-month, with 100 manual snapshots allowed on each paid plan, and scheduled daily, weekly or monthly backups bill at that same rate. Free gets a single manual snapshot and no scheduled backups, which is one more reason not to run a real customer database there.

Neon now sells more than Postgres, and each product has its own meter. Object Storage is $0.023 per GB-month with no per-operation charge. Functions bill $0.10 per active capacity-hour on Launch ($0.12 on Scale) plus $0.60 per million invocations. Managed Better Auth is included up to 1 million monthly active users on paid plans and 60,000 on Free. None of these count against database CU-hours, so budget them separately if you adopt them.

How Neon's bill compares with fixed-size Postgres

Neon wins when the database sleeps; fixed-size hosts win when it never does. The Neon vs Supabase comparison prices both at matched memory and finds Neon cheaper only at the smallest always-on size. The Neon vs PlanetScale page does the same against three-node Postgres, which has no free plan.

The full Supabase invoice is in Supabase pricing, and the wider field is the Postgres hosting roundup. If the database is one piece of a hosted app, the app tier has its own meter: Vercel pricing and Railway pricing cover the two most common hosts for a Neon-backed stack.

For hobby budgets, the free database hosting list ranks the options that never send an invoice, and cloud free tiers compared sets Neon's free compute allowance next to the other providers' allowances.

Which Neon plan should you pay for?

Stay on Free for prototypes, demos, course projects and internal tools that can sleep and stay inside the per-project storage cap. The 100-project allowance makes it practical to keep one database per experiment, and the hard stop means a forgotten project never bills you.

Move to Launch the day a real user depends on the database, or the day you need it awake on demand without a monthly suspension. Set an autoscaling maximum and keep scale to zero on every non-production branch, and most small apps will pay between the low and medium rows of the workload table.

Choose Scale when a customer, auditor or regulator requires the SLA, HIPAA, SOC 2 report or private networking, or when you need more than 16 CU or a restore window beyond 7 days. Funded startups should apply to the Startup Program first: Neon offers up to $100k in credits, which puts the first stretch of production on Launch or Scale at no cash cost.

How we checked these prices

We read Neon's pricing page and plans documentation in October 2026, including the plan table, the workload estimates and the billing FAQ. Workload totals multiply Neon's published CU-hour and storage figures by each plan's rates and exclude history, branch, egress and add-on meters. Prices change, so confirm on Neon's pricing page before you sign off a budget.

FAQ

How much does Neon cost in 2026?

Neon has no monthly fee. Free is $0 with 100 CU-hours and 1 GB of storage per project. Launch bills $0.106 per CU-hour and Scale $0.222 per CU-hour, and both charge $0.35 per GB-month of storage. A small database that scales to zero, using 140 CU-hours and 1 GB, costs $15.19 a month on Launch.

What is a CU-hour on Neon?

A CU-hour is one compute unit running for one hour, and a compute unit is roughly 4 GB of RAM with matching CPU. A database at 0.25 CU awake for 8 hours uses 2 CU-hours. Neon bills the average size times the hours the compute runs, and an idle database that has scaled to zero uses none.

Is Neon's free plan really free?

Yes. Free costs nothing, needs no credit card and has no time limit. Each of up to 100 projects gets its own monthly compute allowance and storage cap, with 20 GB across all projects. When compute runs out, the database suspends until next month instead of billing you, and when storage is full, writes fail until you free space.

Is there a minimum monthly charge on Launch or Scale?

No. Neon's paid plans have no base fee or monthly minimum, so a month of light use might cost only a few dollars. Free allowances do not carry over after you upgrade, though: on a paid plan, compute and storage meter from zero at the plan's rates.

Is Neon Scale worth double the compute price?

Only if you need what Scale adds: SLAs, HIPAA, SOC 2 report access, private networking, sizes past 16 CU, 25 branches per project or a 30-day restore window. For the same high-load database, Scale costs $701 a month against $353 on Launch. A team without those requirements gets the same database on Launch.

How much do Neon branches cost?

Launch includes 10 branches per project and Scale 25. Extra branches cost $1.50 per branch-month, prorated hourly at about $0.002 an hour. A child branch adds no storage cost while it matches its parent inside the history window, but it bills like a root branch once it ages out, so short-lived preview branches stay cheap.

Cite this: Devshot, "Neon Pricing 2026: CU-Hours, Storage and the Free Plan", October 2026.

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