MongoDB Atlas free tier too small? Compare free database alternatives: Supabase, Neon, CockroachDB, Turso, Xata, PocketBase, Convex, and more. Catalogue dates August to November 2026.
MongoDB Atlas is the most popular hosted document database, but its free tier comes with hard limits: 512 MB storage on a shared M0 cluster, no backups, limited connections, and no Atlas Search on free clusters. Developers building side projects hit these limits fast — a modest collection of user data and logs can fill 512 MB in weeks.
The bigger issue is the SSPL license. MongoDB switched from AGPL to the Server Side Public License in 2018, which effectively prevents cloud providers and many companies from offering MongoDB-as-a-service. This has accelerated the shift toward Postgres-based alternatives (Supabase, Neon, Xata) and edge-native databases (Turso, Cloudflare D1) that offer more generous free tiers with truly open-source licenses.
The database landscape in 2026 offers compelling alternatives across every use case: serverless Postgres with branching (Neon), distributed SQL (CockroachDB), edge SQLite (Turso, D1), reactive backends (Convex), and full BaaS platforms (Supabase, Firebase, Appwrite). Most offer significantly more free storage than MongoDB Atlas.
Postgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The Free plan is $0: unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database on a shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress plus 5 GB cached egress, 1 GB file storage, 500,000 Edge Function invocations, and Realtime with 200 concurrent connections and 2 million messages a month. Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity, with a limit of 2 active projects. Pro starts at $25 a month for the first project and includes $10 a month of compute credits, enough for one Micro instance.
Supabase makes daily backups only for Pro, Team and Enterprise projects, so a free project has none, and Supabase recommends exporting it yourself with the CLI's db dump command. (From supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/backups, read 2026-10-05.)
A paused project can be restored from the dashboard for 1 year. After that, only its backup file and Storage objects can be downloaded. (From supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/upgrading, read 2026-10-05.)
Supabase notifies you when you exceed the Free Plan quota. Continued overuse brings restrictions that can include a read-only database, 402 responses to every API request, or paused projects. They lift when the quota refills next billing cycle or on upgrade to Pro. (From supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/billing-faq, read 2026-10-05.)
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.)
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.
Edge SQLite — 100 databases, 5 GB storage, 500M rows read/month, 10M rows written/month free. On 2026-10-02 Turso announced that Supabase is acquiring it. Turso says the service keeps running and that databases, APIs and workflows continue as they do today.
Turso's free plan needs no credit card. (From turso.tech/pricing, read 2026-10-22.)
The Developer plan costs $5.99 per month, or $4.99 per month when billed yearly. It includes 9GB storage, 2.5 billion rows read, 25 million rows written and 10GB syncs per month. Overage rates are $0.75 per GB storage, $1 per billion rows read, $1 per million rows written and $0.35 per GB syncs. (From turso.tech/pricing.md, read 2026-10-29.)
Overage billing on a paid plan is off by default. Enabling it lets you go over your plan's included limits and pay per usage. (From turso.tech/pricing.md, read 2026-10-29.)
On the Free plan, or on a paid plan with Overages off, your databases are blocked once you exceed the limit on any single metric. (From turso.tech/pricing, read 2026-10-29.)
Databases on the free plan are archived after 10 days of inactivity. The CLI command turso group unarchive <group-name> unarchives them. (From docs.turso.tech/cli/group/unarchive, read 2026-10-29.)
A Spark account can create a small number of projects, usually about 5-10. (From firebase.google.com/support/faq, read 2026-10-05.)
Linking a Cloud Billing account to a Spark project, including one with $300 Google Cloud free trial credits, automatically upgrades it to the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan. (From firebase.google.com/docs/projects/billing/firebase-pricing-plans, read 2026-10-05.)
On Spark, email-link sign-in is limited to 5 emails a day; sending more needs a billing account (Blaze). (From firebase.google.com/docs/auth/limits, read 2026-10-07.)
Phone (SMS) sign-in is not available on the Spark plan; on Blaze each SMS sent is billed. (From firebase.google.com/pricing, read 2026-10-20.)
Since September 1, 2026, Remote Config allows up to 100,000 fetch requests a day per Spark project at no cost. A Spark project that exceeds this limit gets 30 days of normal service, then is throttled unless it upgrades to Blaze. Blaze projects pay $0.06 per 10,000 requests above 100,000 a day, up to 10,000,000, and $0.01 per 10,000 above that. (From firebase.google.com/docs/remote-config/pricing, read 2026-10-17.)
Spark projects that used Remote Config before September 1, 2026 are subject to the 100,000-fetches-a-day limit from December 1, 2026 until they upgrade to Blaze. Blaze projects that used Remote Config before September 1, 2026 start Remote Config billing on February 1, 2027. A Spark project that used Remote Config before September 1, 2026 and upgrades to Blaze before November 15, 2026 starts Remote Config billing on February 1, 2027. (From firebase.google.com/docs/remote-config/pricing, read 2026-10-17.)
On the Blaze plan, all Gemini Developer API usage, including calls through Firebase AI Logic, is pay-as-you-go, and most projects must prepay. A project with no billing account (on Spark) can use the Gemini Developer API's free tier with no payment method. (From firebase.google.com/docs/ai-logic/pricing, read 2026-10-21.)
Open-source BaaS — 75K MAU, 2 GB storage, 750K function executions/month, 5 GB bandwidth, 1 database, 1 bucket and 2 functions per project, 500K database reads and 250K writes a month. Limit of 2 projects.
The Free plan's resources are shared across the account's 2 projects, which draw on one allowance. Paid plans give each project its own resources. (From appwrite.io/docs/advanced/billing/free, read 2026-10-11.)
A Free project with no development activity in the Appwrite Console for 7 days is paused. User traffic does not prevent pausing. The project becomes inaccessible to users and stops running backups, cron jobs, and scheduled functions until reactivated in the Console. (From appwrite.io/changelog/entry/2026-02-20-1, read 2026-10-11.)
From October 19, 2026, cron schedules for functions on Appwrite Cloud need a paid plan. On the Free and Education plans, functions run only on an interval of 60 minutes or longer. Existing cron schedules become intervals close to how often they ran. (From appwrite.io/changelog/entry/2026-10-15-1, read 2026-10-19.)
If a Free project reaches any resource limit, such as function executions or monthly active users, it freezes and the Console becomes read-only until the next billing cycle, or the owner upgrades to Pro or removes the resources over the limit. (From appwrite.io/pricing, read 2026-10-05.)
From November 5, 2026, Appwrite Cloud deletes inactive function and site deployments more than 30 days old by default. A deployment's age counts from the day it was created. The active deployment and any deployment a custom domain points to are kept. On the Free plan, retention can be raised to at most 90 days and each function or site keeps at most its 100 newest inactive deployments. (From appwrite.io/blog/post/default-deployment-retention, read 2026-10-22.)
Pro starts at $25 a month. It includes one project with 2TB bandwidth, 150GB storage, 3.5M executions and 200K monthly active users. Each additional project costs $15. (From appwrite.io/pricing, read 2026-10-29.)
Additional API bandwidth costs $15 per 100GB a month. Additional storage costs $2.8 per 100GB. Additional executions cost $2 per 1m. Additional users cost $3 per 1,000 users. Additional reads cost $0.060 per 100k and writes $0.10 per 100k. (From appwrite.io/pricing, read 2026-10-29.)
On Pro, Appwrite automatically buys extra resources when an organization exceeds its limits. The budget cap limits how much it can scale. (From appwrite.io/docs/advanced/billing/pro, read 2026-10-29.)
Open-source Postgres platform (Apache 2.0) with copy-on-write branching and scale-to-zero. Self-hosted on Kubernetes — free forever. The managed platform, Xata Cloud, is paid: from $0.012 an hour plus $0.28 per GB-month of storage, billed by the minute, with a 14-day free trial.
Xata announced on November 9, 2026 that it is joining ClickHouse. Xata continues to accept new sign-ups and customers can use it as usual. Xata will eventually migrate customers to ClickHouse Managed Postgres after feature parity. Xata did not give a date for the migration. (From xata.io/blog/xata-is-joining-clickhouse, read 2026-11-10.)
SQLite at the edge — 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day, 5 GB total storage. Resets daily at midnight UTC
On the Free plan, once the account reaches its daily read or write limit, D1 refuses queries and returns errors until the limits reset at 00:00 UTC; upgrading to Workers Paid removes the limits. (From developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-20.)
On the Free plan a single D1 database can hold at most 500 MB, and an account can have at most 10 databases, within the 5 GB account total. (From developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/limits, read 2026-10-20.)
The Workers Paid plan includes 25 billion rows read, 50 million rows written, and 5 GB storage monthly. Rows read overage is $0.001 per million. Rows written overage is $1.00 per million. Storage overage is $0.75 per GB-mo. There are no egress charges. (From developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-29.)
Time Travel restores a database from up to 30 days ago on Workers Paid and 7 days on Free. The paid plan has a 10 GB maximum database size and 1 TB storage per account. (From developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/limits, read 2026-10-29.)
Open-source backend in a single Go binary — SQLite database, real-time subscriptions, built-in auth (email, OAuth2), file storage (S3-compatible), REST API. Completely free and self-hosted, no vendor lock-in. Single executable, no dependenciesThe page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-10-30, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
*PocketBase and Xata (post-April-2026 open-source pivot) are fully free when self-hosted — actual limits depend on your hardware. Turso and D1 provide 5 GB of edge SQLite.
SQLite at the edge — 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day, 5 GB total storage. Resets daily at midnight UTC. On the Free plan, once the account reaches its daily read or write limit, D1 refuses queries and returns errors until the limits reset at 00:00 UTC; upgrading to Workers Paid removes the limits. (From https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/pricing/, read 2026-10-20.) On the Free plan a single D1 database can hold at most 500 MB, and an account can have at most 10 databases, within the 5 GB account total. (From https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/limits/, read 2026-10-20.) Cloudflare D1's free plan needs no credit card. (From https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/d1/, read 2026-10-22.) D1 usage past Free limits requires the Workers Paid plan. That plan has a minimum charge of $5 per month per account. (From https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/, read 2026-10-29.) The Workers Paid plan includes 25 billion rows read, 50 million rows written, and 5 GB storage monthly. Rows read overage is $0.001 per million. Rows written overage is $1.00 per million. Storage overage is $0.75 per GB-mo. There are no egress charges. (From https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/pricing/, read 2026-10-29.) Time Travel restores a database from up to 30 days ago on Workers Paid and 7 days on Free. The paid plan has a 10 GB maximum database size and 1 TB storage per account. (From https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/platform/limits/, read 2026-10-29.)
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