Neon pricing explained: Free, Launch, Scale and compute hours
Kofi Agyem, Founder and CEO, CloudzyroPublished · 5 min read
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How Neon's Postgres pricing works: the Free, Launch and Scale plans, CU-hours and storage, what's included, worked monthly examples and how to spend less.
1. Neon's plans at a glance
Neon runs serverless Postgres that scales to zero when idle. You pay for compute while the database runs and for the storage it holds. Figures from Neon's pricing page, which Neon last updated on October 31, 2026, checked on November 1, 2026.
- Free: $0. Up to 100 projects, each with 100 CU-hours a month, 1 GB of storage and 5 GB of network transfer.
- Launch: usage-based, $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB a month. Typical spend, by Neon's estimate, $15 a month.
- Scale: usage-based, $0.222 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB a month, with SLAs, HIPAA and private networking.
Paid plans have no monthly minimum or base fee. Neon also runs programs for AI app platforms, startups (up to $100,000 in credits) and open source projects.
2. What each plan includes
Free: compute up to 2 CU (8 GB of memory), 10 branches per project, instant restore up to 6 hours back (or 1 GB of changes), 1 day of monitoring, Managed Better Auth up to 60,000 monthly users per project, 5 GB of object storage per project, and community support.
Launch: compute up to 16 CU (64 GB), 100 projects, instant restore up to 7 days, 500 GB of transfer per project, 3 days of monitoring and billing support.
Scale: compute up to 56 CU (224 GB), 1,000 or more projects, 25 branches per project included, restore up to 30 days, 14 days of monitoring, private networking, HIPAA and SOC 2 report access.
Every plan includes autoscaling, scale to zero, branching, connection pooling with up to 10,000 pooled connections, extensions such as pgvector and PostGIS, and unlimited team members.
3. How usage is billed
Compute is measured in CU-hours: the average size of your compute in CUs, times the hours it runs. One CU is about 4 GB of memory. An idle database scales to zero after 5 minutes and uses no CU-hours, though its storage is still billed.
On Launch and Scale:
- Storage: $0.35 per GB a month
- Instant restore history: $0.20 per GB a month, based on changes in your chosen window
- Extra branches: $0.002 per branch-hour
- Snapshots and scheduled backups: $0.09 per GB a month
- Network transfer: 500 GB per project included, then $0.10 per GB
- Object storage: $0.023 per GB a month
Free plan allowances don't carry over to paid plans: usage meters from zero once you upgrade.
4. Backend services and their prices
Neon projects can also use Auth, object storage, functions and an AI gateway. These are billed apart from database compute:
- Managed Better Auth: no separate charge, up to 60,000 monthly users per project on Free and 1 million on paid plans
- Object storage: $0.023 per GB a month, with no charge per operation; 5 GB per project free
- Functions: $0.10 per active capacity-hour on Launch ($0.12 on Scale), $0.025 per waiting capacity-hour ($0.03 on Scale) and $0.60 per million invocations; Free includes 10 active hours, 400 waiting hours and 1 million invocations per project
- AI Gateway: on Launch and Scale, at the model provider's list prices with no markup
- Realtime: free during the beta, though the database compute it uses is billed as usual
5. Worked examples
These use Neon's own workload sizes:
- Intermittent load on Launch: 140 CU-hours ($14.84) and 1 GB of storage ($0.35). About $15 a month.
- A small always-on database on Launch: with scale to zero off, a 0.25 CU database uses at least about 182.5 CU-hours a month. At 190 CU-hours ($20.14) and 5 GB ($1.75), about $22 a month.
- Constant load on Launch: 720 CU-hours ($76.32) and 10 GB ($3.50). About $80 a month.
- High load on Scale: 3,000 CU-hours ($666) and 100 GB ($35). $701 a month.
- A database per customer: Neon's own example of 100 tenant databases on Launch, each at 0.25 CU for about an hour a day with 150 MB stored, comes to roughly $85 a month, about $0.85 per tenant.
6. Limits worth knowing
- On Free, a project that uses its 100 CU-hours or 5 GB of transfer is suspended until next month.
- On Free, writes that grow a project past 1 GB, or all projects past 20 GB, fail until you free space.
- Scale to zero means the first query after a quiet spell waits for the database to start, typically a few hundred milliseconds.
- Turning scale to zero off keeps the database warm but sets a floor of about 182.5 CU-hours a month at 0.25 CU.
7. How to keep your Neon bill down
- Leave scale to zero on for anything that doesn't need to answer instantly.
- Set a sensible maximum CU so autoscaling can't run away.
- Keep the instant restore window as short as you're comfortable with, since history storage is billed.
- Delete branches you no longer need, and turn on spending notifications.
8. Where Cloudzyro fits
Neon runs the database; Cloudzyro hosts the site or app that uses it. Copy your Neon connection string, paste it into your site's Database tab, select Check, then Save and deploy. The site itself is a flat price: Launch is free with 1 CPU, 512 MB of memory and 100 GB of traffic, and Boost is $20 a month per site with 2 CPUs, 2 GB and 1 TB. See Sites & Apps and Pricing.