Supabase vs PlanetScale vs Neon Free Tier Limits Real App Usage Breakdown

PlanetScale killed its free tier in March 2024. That single decision sent thousands of developers scrambling to Supabase and Neon overnight — and the landscape has reshuffled enough that anything you learned from a 2023 tutorial is probably wrong now.

Storage limits shifted. Compute hours got capped. Connection pooling rules changed. If you’re building a real app — even a small side project — the details matter enormously.

The thesis is straightforward: these three platforms have radically different free tier philosophies, and the right choice depends entirely on your app’s traffic pattern, not just raw storage numbers.

Key Takeaways

• PlanetScale dropped its free tier in March 2024. Its cheapest paid plan starts at $39/month — not the right default for indie developers or side projects.
• Supabase’s free tier caps projects at 500MB database storage, 5GB bandwidth, and 50,000 monthly active users. Adequate for early-stage apps, but projects pause after 7 consecutive days of inactivity.
• Neon’s free tier offers 0.5GB storage with autoscaling compute (0.25–2 vCPU) and no pause policy — the most developer-friendly option for low-traffic or intermittent workloads.
• At 10,000 monthly active users, Supabase’s Pro plan ($25/month) delivers the best price-to-feature ratio when you need auth, storage, and edge functions bundled together.
• For pure Postgres flexibility, Neon wins. For full-stack teams that want one platform, Supabase wins. PlanetScale is largely out of the free-tier conversation entirely.

The Landscape Shift That Changed Everything

For most of 2022 and 2023, PlanetScale was the darling of the MySQL-over-HTTP crowd. Prisma users loved it. Vercel deploys pointed at it by default in half a dozen tutorials. The free Hobby tier was genuinely generous: 5GB storage, 1 billion row reads per month.

Then March 2024 happened. PlanetScale dropped the Hobby plan entirely. The backlash was immediate — GitHub issues, Twitter threads, Reddit posts from developers who’d built production apps on the assumption that free tier was stable. It wasn’t.

Neon had been quietly building since its 2022 launch. By mid-2024 it had raised $46 million in Series B funding and positioned itself as the serverless Postgres platform. Its autoscale-to-zero model — where your database stops consuming compute when idle — was a direct answer to the “I don’t want to pay for a database that gets 12 requests a day” problem.

Supabase, meanwhile, kept its free tier intact but tightened the inactivity pause policy. A project with no activity for 7 days gets paused. That’s fine if users log in daily. Not fine for a cron-job-driven app that only wakes up monthly.

By Q1 2026, the three platforms occupy very different positions:

• Supabase: Full-stack BaaS with Postgres at the core. Auth, storage, edge functions, realtime — all included.
• PlanetScale: MySQL-compatible, schema branching, scales to enormous read volumes. No free tier.
• Neon: Serverless Postgres with autoscaling, branching, and a genuinely useful free tier.

Detailed Free Tier Analysis

What Supabase’s Free Tier Actually Gives You

Supabase’s free tier is more generous than it looks at first glance — and more limiting than the marketing copy suggests.

What you get (per project):

• 500MB database storage
• 5GB bandwidth
• 50,000 monthly active users (auth)
• 500MB file storage
• 2 free projects
• Edge functions: 500,000 invocations/month

The catch: projects pause after 7 consecutive days of inactivity. Restoration takes 20–30 seconds on the first request. For a public-facing app, that cold-start delay is user-visible and ugly.

According to Supabase’s own pricing documentation (verified May 2026), the free tier also caps you at a shared CPU with no performance guarantees. At moderate traffic — around 200 concurrent users — query latency can spike unpredictably.

The 500MB storage limit is the real constraint. A simple SaaS app with users, posts, and metadata can hit that ceiling faster than expected, especially if you’re storing JSON blobs or using Postgres for full-text search indexing.

Neon’s Free Tier: The Serverless Advantage

Neon’s free tier is structured differently by design — built around compute hours, not just storage.

What you get:

• 0.5GB storage
• Autoscaling compute: 0.25 to 2 vCPU (scales to zero when idle)
• 191.9 compute hours/month (per Neon’s official pricing page, May 2026)
• 1 project, 10 branches
• No project pause policy

The compute-hour model is genuinely clever. An app receiving 100 requests per day might consume only 5–10 compute hours monthly — well within the free limit. Burst-traffic apps fit this model extremely well: think a newsletter tool that processes sends once a week, then sits idle the rest of the time.

Branching is Neon’s standout feature. Ten database branches on the free tier means you can run staging, feature branches, and production off a single plan. That’s a concrete development workflow advantage Supabase and PlanetScale don’t match at this price point.

Storage at 0.5GB is roughly equivalent to Supabase’s limit. Neither platform is designed for data-heavy free-tier workloads.

PlanetScale: Where It Fits in 2026

No free tier means PlanetScale drops out of the “starting a project this weekend” conversation entirely. Its cheapest plan — Scaler, at $39/month — targets teams with real MySQL workloads that need branching and safe schema migrations.

The technical differentiation is still real. Vitess-backed horizontal sharding, non-blocking schema changes, and a read replica system capable of handling millions of reads per second put it in a different category. But that’s a different conversation than free tier limits.

For this comparison, PlanetScale is essentially out of contention unless you’re already paying.

Side-by-Side Comparison

The auth inclusion is a bigger deal than it looks. Supabase’s free tier gives you a complete auth system — magic links, OAuth, row-level security — at zero cost. Neon gives you raw Postgres. You’d need to add Auth.js or Clerk (free tiers available, but extra configuration) to match Supabase’s out-of-the-box experience.

Branching favors Neon at the free tier. Ten branches with autoscaling compute means a solo developer can run a reasonably mature GitOps workflow for free. Supabase offers two separate free projects as a workaround — not the same thing.

Where Each Platform Breaks Down in Real Usage

The Indie Developer Scenario

Building a Next.js app, a few hundred users, intermittent traffic. Neon wins. The scale-to-zero model means you’re not burning compute on idle time, and you’ll never hit the pause wall Supabase imposes. The tradeoff: you’re wiring up auth and storage yourself.

The Early-Stage SaaS Scenario

You need auth, file uploads, maybe realtime notifications, and you want one platform to manage. Supabase’s free tier handles this well up to roughly 200–300 daily active users and 300MB of data. The 7-day pause policy doesn’t affect you if users log in regularly.

At 1,000 MAU, you’re still comfortably within the free tier. At 10,000 MAU with a growing data footprint, you’re looking at the $25/month Pro plan — which includes 8GB storage, 250GB bandwidth, and daily backups. That’s a reasonable step up with a clear upgrade path.

The High-Scale Scenario

Neither Supabase nor Neon’s free tier gets you there. PlanetScale’s Scaler at $39/month or Supabase Pro at $25/month are your entry points. At 100,000 users, Supabase’s pricing scales predictably — the Pro plan covers most usage, with MAU overages at $0.00325 per user above 100K, per Supabase’s official pricing documentation.

This approach can fail when your data footprint grows faster than your user count. A media-heavy or analytics-heavy app will hit storage limits long before MAU limits, and storage overages add up faster than the user-based pricing suggests.

Practical Decision Framework

Starting a project today:

Choose Neon if you want pure Postgres flexibility, you’ll manage auth separately, and your traffic is bursty or low-volume. The no-pause policy and branching support alone justify it for serious solo developers.

Choose Supabase if you want auth, storage, and realtime included out of the box, you’ll have regular user activity (sidestepping the pause), and you’re building a full-stack web app with a predictable growth curve. The path from free to $25/month Pro is smooth and well-documented.

Don’t start on PlanetScale unless you have a specific MySQL or Vitess requirement and budget for the $39/month entry point. The platform is excellent — it’s just not a free-tier conversation anymore.

Watch for these signals in the next 6 months:

1. Neon has been incrementally expanding its free tier compute hours. A further increase would make it the clear default for Postgres-first developers.
2. Supabase announced in Q4 2025 that it’s working on making the inactivity pause window configurable. If that ships, the free tier becomes significantly more useful for low-frequency apps.
3. PlanetScale’s PS-10 pricing tier (announced late 2025) may introduce a lower entry point. Worth checking their pricing page before ruling them out.

What the Data Tells You to Do

There’s no single winner — but there is a wrong choice for most indie developers, and that’s defaulting to PlanetScale out of habit from 2023 tutorials.

Neon and Supabase are both genuinely strong free tier options in 2026, with different tradeoffs:

• Neon = flexible, developer-first, best for Postgres purists who want branching and autoscaling with no babysitting
• Supabase = faster to ship, full-stack batteries included, best for teams that want everything in one dashboard

At real scale — 10K to 100K users — Supabase’s $25/month Pro plan delivers better ROI than any competitor at that tier, assuming you’re using its bundled services. If you’re only using the database, Neon’s paid Launch tier at $19/month undercuts Supabase on price for equivalent storage.

One concrete action worth taking: run your expected traffic pattern through Neon’s compute hour estimator before committing. The numbers might surprise you — in both directions.

If you’ve migrated away from PlanetScale since 2024, the migration patterns are worth a dedicated breakdown. Drop a comment with your stack.

References

1. Neon vs. Supabase: Which One Should I Choose | Bytebase
2. Database Costs Compared for Vibe-Coded Apps in 2026 - Real pricing breakdowns for Supabase, PlanetSc
3. Supabase Pricing: Real Costs at 10K-100K Users

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