Side-by-side comparison of free tiers, pricing changes, and stability. Catalogue dates here run to 2026-10-30.
Quick Verdict: Neon is serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero. Turso is edge-native SQLite with global replication. Both are modern, developer-friendly databases — Neon for Postgres compatibility, Turso for ultra-low-latency edge reads.
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.)
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.)
Key Differences
Database engine: Neon runs PostgreSQL (full compatibility, extensions, SQL ecosystem). Turso runs libSQL (SQLite fork with server mode and replication).
Free tier: Neon offers 1 GB of storage per project (20 GB in total), 100 CU-hours/month, up to 100 projects. Turso offers 5 GB storage, 100 databases, 500M rows read/month — significantly more storage.
Edge story: Turso replicates data to edge locations for sub-millisecond reads. Neon runs in a single region but offers a serverless driver for edge function compatibility.
Branching: Neon's killer feature is instant database branching — create full copies for CI/CD preview environments in seconds. Turso doesn't have an equivalent.
Pricing Change History
Neon
increasedeffective 2026-10-01medium 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 ↗
increasedeffective 2026-03-13medium impact
Neon's Free plan went from one member per organization to unlimited members. Source ↗
increasedeffective 2025-12-19medium 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 ↗
increasedeffective 2025-12-12medium impact
Neon made Neon Auth available on all plans, including Free. Source ↗
increasedeffective 2025-12-09medium impact
Neon removed the $5 monthly minimum from its paid Launch and Scale plans, which now bill only for what you use. Source ↗
Turso
No recorded pricing changes for Turso.
Our Recommendation
Choose Neon if you need PostgreSQL compatibility, database branching for development workflows, or plan to use an ORM that expects Postgres (Django, Rails, Prisma).
Choose Turso if you need edge-native reads, SQLite simplicity, or are building with frameworks that work well with SQLite (Laravel, Remix with better-sqlite3).
Neon is serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero. Turso is edge-native SQLite with global replication. Both are modern, developer-friendly databases — Neon for Postgres compatibility, Turso for ultra-low-latency edge reads.
What is Neon's free tier?
Neon offers a Free plan: 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 proj...
What is Turso's free tier?
Turso offers a Free plan: 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...
Should I choose Neon or Turso?
Choose Neon if you need PostgreSQL compatibility, database branching for development workflows, or plan to use an ORM that expects Postgres (Django, Rails, Prisma). Choose Turso if you need edge-native reads, SQLite simplicity, or are building with frameworks that work well with SQLite (Laravel, Remix with better-sqlite3).