Compare CockroachDB and Neon free tiers side by side. Pricing, limits, change history, and risk assessment for developers.

CockroachDB vs Neon

Side-by-side free tier comparison. Catalogue dates here run to 2026-10-28.

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Verdict

Neon offers a free tier ("Free") while CockroachDB does not currently have a free tier.

A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. A badge carrying a date states the record it rests on; a badge with no date rests on no record in force.

CockroachDB

CategoryDatabases
TierTrial
Verified2026-08-31
Last read2026-10-24
Changes1 recorded
Distributed SQL database. No free plan for new deployments since 2026-09-15, when CockroachDB moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit; Standard is $0.092 per vCPU-hour. Clusters created before 2026-09-15 stay on their existing plans during their current term.

Neon

Riskstable
CategoryDatabases
TierFree
Verified2026-10-28
Last read2026-10-28
Changes7 recorded
Serverless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB of Postgres storage per project (20 GB total across all projects), 5 GB of public network transfer per project per month, up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, Neon Auth (60K MAU), auto-scaling up to 2 CU, scale-to-zero, 5 GB of Object Storage, and Functions (10 active capacity-hours, 400 waiting capacity-hours, 1M invocations). No credit card is required. The AI Gateway (one Neon credential for models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others) is available on every plan, including Free. It requires a card and a $5 minimum purchase of prepaid credits in the Neon Console. The Free plan otherwise remains unchanged. Model prices match each provider's list price with no markup.
  • Neon's Free plan needs no credit card. (From neon.com/pricing, read 2026-10-22.)
  • An agent can create a Neon Postgres project without a Neon account. Unclaimed projects expire in 72 hours and are limited to 100 MB storage and 1 GB transfer. A person claims the project to keep it. (From neon.com/docs/reference/claimable-neon, read 2026-10-22.)
  • On the Free plan, scale to zero can't be disabled: computes suspend after 5 minutes of inactivity. (From neon.com/docs/introduction/plans, read 2026-10-04.)
  • Neon doesn't pause Free projects for inactivity: an idle database starts again on the next query, with no restore step. (From neon.com/pricing, read 2026-11-01.)
  • Running out of CU-hours or network transfer suspends the compute until the next billing period or an upgrade. (From neon.com/docs/introduction/plans, read 2026-10-04.)
  • Neon's Free plan provides 100 CU-hours per project per month. One CU allocates about 4 GB of RAM, and 100 CU-hours is enough to run a 0.25 CU compute (about 1 GB of RAM) for 400 hours, about 17 days of continuous running. All computes in a project count toward usage, including those for each branch and any read replicas. (From neon.com/docs/introduction/plans, read 2026-11-03.)
  • At the storage cap, inserts, updates and deletes fail until space is freed or the plan is upgraded. (From neon.com/docs/introduction/plans, read 2026-10-04.)
  • Neon's Azure East US 2, West US 3, and Germany West Central regions no longer accept new projects as of April 7, 2026; Free-plan projects there inactive for 90+ days may be deleted after October 5, 2026. (From neon.com/docs/import/azure-regions-deprecation, read 2026-10-07.)
  • Platforms that create databases for their users can apply for the Agent Plan. You must have a Neon Scale plan with a credit card on file and get Neon's approval. Neon sponsors the databases for your free-tier users. Paid usage gets up to $25,000 in credits and compute at $0.106 per compute-unit hour. (From neon.com/docs/introduction/agent-plan.md, read 2026-10-11.)
  • Neon gives $20 in free credits to try paid features, claimed through a promo link in the Neon Console. (From neon.com/pricing.md, read 2026-10-11.)
  • Neon's pricing page offers startups up to $100k in credits. The startup page describes the Databricks Startup Program, up to $200K in credits for Neon and Databricks for qualifying startups. (From neon.com/startups, read 2026-10-11.)
  • Neon's open source programme: Neon reviews each application and decides per project whether to support it with a monthly cash sponsorship through GitHub Sponsors, Neon credits, or both, and how much. Cash sponsorships come from a pool of at least $200,000 a year and run for six-month terms that do not renew automatically. Supported projects can receive up to $5,000 in Neon credits and up to $5,000 in Neon AI Gateway credits. It requires an OSI-approved license and a GitHub Sponsors profile. (From neon.com/programs/open-source.md, read 2026-10-29.)
  • After the free plan, Neon's paid plans bill only for usage, with no monthly minimum: Launch charges $0.106 per CU-hour of compute and Scale $0.222, both charge $0.35 per GB-month of storage, extra branches cost $1.50 per branch-month, and network transfer beyond 500 GB per project costs $0.10 per GB. (From neon.com/pricing.md, read 2026-10-15.)
  • Neon Realtime has been in public beta since 2026-10-15. It provides live updates from SQL queries without polling and is free during the beta. Compute and egress are billed under the plan; beta runs in four AWS regions: us-east-1, us-east-2, eu-central-1 and ap-southeast-1. (From neon.com/docs/realtime/overview, read 2026-10-16.)
  • Neon archives branches older than 14 days and not accessed for 24 hours. Unarchiving happens automatically when a branch is connected to or queried. Branches with large amounts of data may connect and query slower while unarchiving. (From neon.com/docs/guides/branch-archiving, read 2026-10-29.)

Pricing Change History

CockroachDB

removed effective 2026-09-15 high impact
CockroachDB stopped offering its free Basic plan (50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage free per month) to new deployments on 2026-09-15, when it moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations now get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit. Clusters created before 2026-09-15 stay on their existing plans during their current term. Source ↗

Neon

increased effective 2026-10-01 medium impact
Neon raised the Free plan's Postgres storage from 0.5 GB to 1 GB per project and added a limit of 20 GB across all of an account's projects. Source ↗
increased effective 2026-03-13 medium impact
Neon's Free plan went from one member per organization to unlimited members. Source ↗
increased effective 2025-12-19 medium impact
Neon raised the Free plan's project limit from 80 to 100, the last of seven increases since 2025-08-29, when the limit was 10. Source ↗
increased effective 2025-12-12 medium impact
Neon made Neon Auth available on all plans, including Free. Source ↗
increased effective 2025-12-09 medium impact
Neon removed the $5 monthly minimum from its paid Launch and Scale plans, which now bill only for what you use. Source ↗

Showing the 5 most recent of 7 recorded changes for Neon.

Watch Both Vendors for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=CockroachDB curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=CockroachDB curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Neon curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Neon

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