Neon vs Supabase: Which is cheaper for a small app?

Free tier limits: 100 CU-hours vs a 500 MB database

Both platforms give you a permanent free plan with no credit card required, but they limit resources differently.

Neon gives each project 100 CU-hours of compute per month. One Compute Unit (CU) allocates approximately 4 GB of RAM along with associated CPU and local SSD resources. Neon lets you run a 0.25 CU compute instance (1 GB RAM), which stretches that 100 CU-hour pool across 400 hours of runtime each month. Scale-to-zero is permanently enabled on the Free plan and suspends compute after 5 minutes of inactivity. When a query arrives, it wakes up within a few hundred milliseconds. You also get up to 1 GB of Postgres storage per project, capped at 20 GB across all projects in your account, plus 5 GB of public network transfer per project per month.

Supabase gives you two active projects on its Free Plan. The database includes 500 MB of disk space, a shared CPU with 500 MB of RAM (Nano compute), 5 GB of public egress, 5 GB of cached egress, 1 GB of file storage, and 50,000 monthly active users. Unlike Neon, Supabase compute does not scale to zero between queries; instead, a free project pauses entirely after 1 week of inactivity. You can hold as many paused projects as you want and unpause them when needed.

The catch on free tiers is what happens when you hit a ceiling. When you burn through your 100 CU-hours or 5 GB of network transfer on Neon, your compute suspends until the next billing period or until you upgrade. If you pass the 1 GB storage cap, write operations like inserts, updates, and deletes fail, though your existing data stays intact. On Supabase, the hard walls are the 500 MB database cap and the 2-active-project limit.

Paid plan mechanics: Hourly pay-as-you-go vs $25 base fees

Neon's paid tiers (Launch and Scale) use pure pay-as-you-go billing with hourly metering and no monthly minimums. If your total invoice is under $0.50 at the end of the month, Neon does not even collect it. Launch compute costs $0.106 per CU-hour, while storage costs $0.35 per GB-month measured hourly. Scale-to-zero is enabled by default with a 5-minute inactivity window, but you can turn it off if you need a database that never sleeps.

Supabase Pro takes the opposite approach by charging a predictable $25 monthly subscription up front. That base fee covers your first project, and extra projects cost from $10 per month. The plan gives you $10 per month in compute credits, which exactly covers a Micro instance (1 GB RAM, shared CPU at $0.01344 per hour). It also bundles 8 GB of gp3 disk, 250 GB of public egress, 250 GB of cached egress, 100 GB of file storage, and 100,000 monthly active users.

If you run multiple small databases for side projects, Neon lets you create up to 100 projects on Launch without paying a fixed base fee for each one. On Supabase, five active projects on Pro will cost you at least $65 a month ($25 base plus four extra projects at $10 each) before factoring in any extra resources.

Pricing and limits compared

Here is how the core specifications and unit rates stack up across both providers.

Workload 1: Low-traffic side project with intermittent use

Consider an internal tool, a staging environment, or a hobby SaaS that only sees traffic during work hours or a few times a week.

On Neon Launch:

• Compute size: 0.25 CU (1 GB RAM)
• Active hours: 60 hours per month (compute suspends automatically after 5 minutes of idle time)
• Compute usage: 0.25 CU × 60 hours = 15 CU-hours × $0.106 = $1.59
• Database storage: 4 GB × $0.35 = $1.40
• Instant restore history: 2 GB × $0.20 = $0.40
• Total Neon bill: $3.39 per month.

On Supabase Pro:

• Pro plan subscription: $25.00
• Micro compute instance: $0.01344 × 730 hours = $9.81 (fully covered by the included $10 compute credit)
• Database storage: 4 GB (within the included 8 GB quota)
• Egress and MAUs: within included quotas
• Total Supabase bill: $25.00 per month.

For intermittent workloads, Neon is roughly seven times cheaper. The scale-to-zero compute engine prevents you from paying for idle hours, keeping your monthly costs in single digits.

Workload 2: Production web app running 24/7

Now take a customer-facing web app with background workers, persistent connections, and steady traffic that prevents compute from ever sleeping.

On Neon Launch:

• Compute size: 1 CU (4 GB RAM, scale-to-zero disabled)
• Active hours: 730 hours per month
• Compute usage: 1 CU × 730 hours = 730 CU-hours × $0.106 = $77.38
• Database storage: 20 GB × $0.35 = $7.00
• Instant restore history: 10 GB × $0.20 = $2.00
• Total Neon bill: $86.38 per month.

On Supabase Pro:

• Pro plan subscription: $25.00
• Compute size: Medium instance (4 GB RAM, shared CPU) at $0.0822 per hour × 730 hours = $60.01
• Less included compute credit: -$10.00 (net compute: $50.01)
• Database storage: 20 GB gp3 disk (8 GB included, 12 GB overage at $0.125/GB = $1.50)
• Total Supabase bill: $76.51 per month.

If you need Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) on that production database, the balance shifts again. Neon charges $0.20 per GB-month for root branch history, which cost $2.00 in our example. Supabase charges a flat $100 per month per 7 days of retention for PITR, which pushes the Supabase total to $176.51.

Cost protection: Spend caps and quotas

A rogue query or traffic flood can lead to an unexpected bill if your settings are left wide open.

Supabase has a built-in Spend Cap enabled by default on the Pro Plan. It covers 12 specific usage items: Disk Size, Egress, Edge Function Invocations, Logs Ingest, Logs Query, Monthly Active Users, Monthly Active SSO Users, Monthly Active Third Party Users, Realtime Messages, Realtime Peak Connections, Storage Image Transformations, and Storage Size. When you hit a quota with the cap enabled, further usage for that item stops and you are not billed extra.

Crucially, the Supabase Spend Cap does not cover 11 items:

• Compute
• Branching Compute
• Read Replica Compute
• Custom Domain
• Additionally provisioned Disk IOPS
• Additionally provisioned Disk Throughput
• IPv4 address
• Log Drain Hours
• Log Drain Events
• Multi-Factor Authentication Phone
• Point-in-Time-Recovery

Neon takes a different angle. You can set consumption limits per project through the Neon API to automatically suspend compute when your project hits a compute, storage, or network transfer quota. Neon also provides spending notifications on Launch and Scale that send email alerts at 80% and 100% of a monthly dollar threshold, though those emails alert you without stopping usage.

Monitoring database costs with Costbrake

Watching infrastructure costs across separate vendor consoles is tedious, and unexpected charges usually hit when you are looking elsewhere. Costbrake monitors what you spend across 23 cloud, database, and AI providers, including Neon and Supabase, and flags billing spikes before they get out of hand.

For Neon, Costbrake connects using an organization API key, tracks your consumption history, and offers opt-in killswitches (brakes). If spending surges, an admin can click to cap compute size at 0.25 CU or disable the compute endpoint entirely without deleting data or branches. For Supabase, Costbrake uses a personal access token to track your active projects, compute instance sizes, disk configuration, and paid add-ons against list prices. For both Neon and Supabase, Costbrake checks every 15 minutes on Pro and Team and hourly on the Free plan. To get started, connect your tools at agent setup or review Costbrake pricing.

Which one should you pick?

Pick Neon if:

• Your application has irregular traffic, batch jobs, or long periods of zero activity.
• You want to spin up dozens of isolated database environments or branches for preview deploys without paying $10 to $25 per database.
• You need point-in-time recovery without committing to a flat $100 monthly add-on fee.

Pick Supabase if:

• You need a full backend platform with auth, realtime subscriptions, edge functions, and storage under one roof.
• Your app runs continuously 24/7, where bundled compute credits and cheaper storage rates ($0.125 vs $0.35 per GB) make baseline hosting less expensive.
• You want a hard spending ceiling on egress, storage, and active users via the default Pro Spend Cap.