When is Neon Serverless Postgres the better choice?

You need SQL tables, joins and transactions. You want many small databases. The free plan allows 100 projects. You want a team on the free plan. Neon has no member limit.

When is Upstash the better choice?

You need a cache, a queue or a rate limiter. Your data is small and fits in 256 MB. You want to pay per command once you pass 500K a month.

Neon Serverless Postgres vs Upstash: Free Tier Comparison

Q: How much does Neon Serverless Postgres cost after the free tier?

Launch - usage-based. Neon Launch bills $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month. Scale bills $0.222 per CU-hour. Upstash Pay as You Go bills $0.2 per 100K commands with up to 100 GB of data and unlimited bandwidth. Upstash also sells fixed plans from $10 a month with unlimited commands.

Q: How much does Upstash cost after the free tier?

Pay as You Go - $0.2 per 100K commands. Neon Launch bills $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month. Scale bills $0.222 per CU-hour. Upstash Pay as You Go bills $0.2 per 100K commands with up to 100 GB of data and unlimited bandwidth. Upstash also sells fixed plans from $10 a month with unlimited commands.

Quick answer

Upstash - Neon is a serverless PostgreSQL database. Upstash is a serverless Redis database. Neon's free plan is sized by projects, storage and compute hours. Upstash's free plan is sized by 256 MB of data and 500K commands a month.

How the free tiers compare

Neon's free plan has 100 projects with 0.5 GB of storage each and 100 CU-hours per project each month. It needs no credit card. Upstash's free plan has 256 MB of data, 10 GB of monthly bandwidth and 500K monthly commands. Upstash's Pay as You Go plan charges $0.2 per 100K commands. Neon's Launch plan charges $0.106 per CU-hour.

Neon Serverless Postgres vs Upstash free tier, side by side

	Neon Serverless PostgresFTV 60	UpstashFTV 47
Free data size	0.5 GB per project, 100 projects	256 MB
Free usage	100 CU-hours per project each month	500K commands and 10 GB bandwidth each month
First paid plan	Launch - usage-based, $0.106 per CU-hour	Pay as You Go - $0.2 per 100K commands
Paid data size	$0.35 per GB-month, sizes up to 16 CU	Up to 100 GB of data
Fixed-price option	Launch or Scale, usage-based	Fixed plans from $10/mo, 250 MB, 50 GB bandwidth, unlimited commands

After you outgrow the free tier

Neon Launch bills $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month. Scale bills $0.222 per CU-hour. Upstash Pay as You Go bills $0.2 per 100K commands with up to 100 GB of data and unlimited bandwidth. Upstash also sells fixed plans from $10 a month with unlimited commands.

Neon Serverless Postgres next stepLaunch - usage-basedUsage-based

Upstash next stepPay as You Go - $0.2 per 100K commandsUsage-based

When to pick each one

Pick Neon Serverless Postgres when…

You need SQL tables, joins and transactions.
You want many small databases. The free plan allows 100 projects.
You want a team on the free plan. Neon has no member limit.

Pick Upstash when…

You need a cache, a queue or a rate limiter.
Your data is small and fits in 256 MB.
You want to pay per command once you pass 500K a month.

Bottom line

These two solve different problems. Pick Neon for relational data. Pick Upstash for fast key-value access.

Read the full listings: Neon Serverless Postgres and Upstash. Scores use the FTV methodology at /ftv. Browse more head-to-heads on /compare, or see the top-ranked free tiers on /top.