Neon's Free Plan Keeps Getting Better
Published at Oct 11, 2026
Most posts on this blog are about a service making its free plan worse. This is the opposite.
Neon has been steadily improving its pricing since the new usage-based model launched in August 2025, and the latest changes make the free plan one of the best you can get for Postgres. I have updated the database calculator with all of it.
What is new
On October 2, 2026 Neon doubled the storage on the Free plan:
- 1 GB of storage per project, up from 0.5 GB. Existing projects get the new limit automatically.
At the same time the current plan documentation shows these paid plan changes:
- Launch and Scale include 500 GB of egress per project, up from 100 GB, and $0.10 per GB beyond that.
- No monthly minimum. The $5 minimum on Launch and Scale was removed in December 2025. We missed that update and the calculator was still charging it until now.
The free plan today
| Free plan | |
|---|---|
| Projects | 100 |
| Compute | 100 CU-hours per project per month |
| Storage | 1 GB per project, 20 GB across the account |
| Egress | 5 GB per project per month |
| Branches | 10 per project |
| Price | $0, no card required |
Neon’s own example for the compute is a 0.25 CU instance running 400 hours a month. That is well over half of a full month, and with scale to zero most side projects are idle most of the time anyway.
One thing to watch is the 20 GB account total. The announcement says 100 projects with 1 GB each, but the plan documentation caps the whole account at 20 GB. In practice you can fill 20 projects before you hit the account limit, and Neon does not bill overages on the free plan. Writes that would go over simply fail.
How far it has come
Here is the free plan as Neon announced it on August 14, 2025, next to today.
| August 2025 | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Projects | 10 | 100 |
| Compute | 50 CU-hours per project | 100 CU-hours per project |
| Storage | 0.5 GB per project | 1 GB per project |
| Egress | 5 GB per month | 5 GB per month |
And the paid plans:
| August 2025 | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Launch compute | $0.14 per CU-hour | $0.106 per CU-hour |
| Scale compute | $0.26 per CU-hour | $0.222 per CU-hour |
| Launch and Scale egress included | 100 GB | 500 GB |
| Monthly minimum | $5 | None |
Between those two dates I noticed the free allowance going to 100 CU-hours in September 2025, and the compute price cuts in November 2025. The storage price is unchanged at $0.35 per GB-month.
Why Neon is doing this
Neon’s explanation is agent-driven development. AI coding tools create lots of small projects that sit idle, and Neon wants that to cost the user nothing. In the announcement they say they do not want you hitting limits, and that they can afford the change because the platform gets more efficient as it grows.
I will not pretend it is pure generosity. A free tier that is big enough to build something real is the best marketing a database company has, and it is the same logic as Clerk raising its free tier to 50k MAU. The difference from the free plans that get cut is that an idle project should cost very little to keep around, so there is less pressure to take the plan away later. That is my read, not a promise from Neon.
Is it enough?
For hobby projects, prototypes and internal tools, yes, comfortably. 1 GB holds a lot of rows for a typical app.
The limit you are most likely to hit is egress at 5 GB per month, not storage or compute. If your app moves a lot of data out of the database, check that number first.
When you do grow, the move from Free to Launch is smooth. There is no minimum, you pay for the compute and storage you use, and the first 500 GB of egress per project is included. Compare it with the other providers in the database calculator.