Built to scale

Neon fits into every stage of growth, from the first side project to operating large fleets of production databases - without forcing you to rethink your architecture along the way.

Stage 1: Side projects

A full Postgres backend on the Free plan

When you’re looking for a free plan to run Postgres, what you want is simplicity and enough room to build. Neon’s Free plan abstracts most database configuration work, delivers real-world performance, and gives you access to branching and autoscaling - and you can deploy not only a Postgres database but Managed Better Auth, Object Storage for your files, and Functions.

You get a Free plan with real resources, including up to 100 projects, computes with up to 2 CU, and 0.5 GB of storage per project - enough to build and test real applications
You get a Postgres connection string in a second so you can start building right away
Scale to zero ensures idle databases don’t eat up your compute limits: only active time counts
Standard Postgres compatibility means you can plug Lakebase Postgres into any framework, ORM, or tool that speaks Postgres
A broad catalog of Postgres extensions unlocks a Postgres-for-everything workflow
You get access to an entire backend via Managed Better Auth, Neon Object Storage, and Neon Functions

Stage 2: Startups

Build and iterate fast

As a project becomes a product, small teams need to ship quickly and support real users. Neon allows these teams to build fast via coding agents without compromising on scalability or reliability, backed by the Lakebase Postgres features:

Autoscaling adapts automatically to unpredictable workloads: you don’t have to plan capacity in advance
Branching lets you spin up development, preview, and test environments instantly, matching the latest production state, without manual work
Out-of-the-box integrations with platforms like Vercel further simplify previews and deployments
API-first workflows make it easy to automate almost all database operations
AI-coding support via MCP and Agent Skills allows tools like Cursor and Claude to fully interact with Neon
Instant restores lower the stakes for mistakes and accidents
Built-in connection pooling takes care of growing connections in your serverless apps
You get access to compliance and security features without enterprise-only contracts

Stage 3: Scale-ups and large fleets

Operations at scale

At this stage, teams need performance, reliability, isolation, and automation without ballooning costs or operational complexity. The lakebase architecture is built to address their different requirements directly.

Operational efficiency

On-demand storage grows as data demands it, without planning for capacity in advance and without the risk of full-disk errors
Built-in high availability is provided by default through storage redundancy, with data replicated across availability zones and cloud object storage
Backup and restore via snapshots allows you to recover multi-terabyte databases in seconds, without full data copies
You can use time travel and snapshot inspections to review past database states for auditing, debugging, and incident analysis
By creating environments as copy-on-write branches, you avoid the management work and costs associated with running separate instances for development, staging, testing, or recovery
Programmatic lifecycle management lets you create, reset, and delete large numbers of environments without eating up engineering time

Multi-tenancy

A database-per-tenant setup gives each customer a dedicated Neon project, providing strong isolation, eliminating noisy neighbors, and ensuring consistent performance
API-first tenant management enables programmatic provisioning, configuration, scaling, recovery, and deletion of tenant databases, making it practical for small teams to manage thousands of tenants

Fleet management for platforms and agents

Instant, API-driven provisioning lets you deploy a full Neon backend, Lakebase Postgres plus the primitives you need, as part of your platform or agent
The fully embedded experience keeps Neon invisible to your end users, with no third-party logins or external configuration required as part of your product workflow
Scale to zero keeps unit costs low when large numbers of generated apps are never used or only accessed sporadically
A mature API exposes fleet management and cost-control capabilities including quotas, usage limits, and lifecycle operations
You can build versioning, checkpoints, rollbacks, and time-travel workflows with minimal engineering effort via snapshots
Backend primitives such as Managed Better Auth, Neon Object Storage, Neon Functions, the PostgREST-compatible Data API, and the AI Gateway let you hook up full-stack applications by default