PricePulse live SaaS pricing

TL;DR

• Neon wins on cost at low-to-moderate usage: no base fee on paid tiers, pay only for compute hours and storage consumed.
• Supabase wins on breadth: auth, storage, realtime subscriptions, and edge functions are included in the $25 Pro plan with no extra services to wire up.
• Neon wins on branching and dev workflow: 10 branches on Free, 25 on Scale, with instant restore and time travel up to 30 days.
• Supabase wins on team and org management: the $599/mo Team plan adds RBAC, dashboard SSO, and centralized billing across projects.
• Tie on free-tier availability with a critical difference: Supabase pauses inactive projects after one week while Neon only scales to zero after 5 minutes of inactivity.
• Tie on compliance: both offer SOC 2 and HIPAA availability at higher tiers, with HIPAA incurring additional cost on both sides.

Pricing at a glance

Neon's Launch and Scale tiers have no monthly minimum. You pay only for compute hours and storage consumed. Supabase's Pro tier charges a flat $25 per project per month before any overages kick in.

Who should pick Neon

You are building a multi-tenant SaaS with many isolated databases. Neon's Free tier supports up to 100 projects at no cost. On paid tiers, there is no per-project flat fee, so 50 low-traffic tenant databases does not automatically mean 50x $25.

Your workload is spiky or has long idle windows. Scale-to-zero is the defining feature: Neon suspends compute after 5 minutes of inactivity and cold-starts quickly. If your app handles burst traffic with hours of silence between, you pay for compute only during actual use rather than a flat fee that runs regardless.

Your team runs a feature-branch development workflow. Branching lets you spin up a full copy of your database schema for each pull request and discard it on merge. Free includes 10 branches per project; Scale includes 25. Combined with up to 30-day time travel and instant restore, this is a meaningful productivity tool for database-heavy feature development.

You only need Postgres. If you already handle auth with Clerk or Auth0, storage with S3, and realtime with Ably or Pusher, paying for Supabase's bundled stack is redundant. Neon gives you a fast, well-managed Postgres endpoint and nothing else you did not ask for.

Who should pick Supabase

You are building a greenfield app and want one platform for everything. Supabase ships Postgres, authentication, file storage, edge functions, and realtime subscriptions in a single project. The $25 Pro plan covers all of them. Replacing that stack piecemeal with separate services costs more money and more maintenance time.

You want predictable costs at steady-state usage. Neon's metered pricing is great at very low usage, but at moderate sustained loads a flat $25 baseline is easier to budget. If your database runs most of the day, Neon's per-hour compute charges can exceed Supabase's flat fee before you expect it.

Your organization needs centralized billing and role-based access control. Supabase's Team plan adds RBAC for team members, SSO for the dashboard, and org-level billing in one invoice. If your engineering team needs governance over who can touch which projects, that $599/mo tier is purpose-built for it.

You want a self-hostable exit ramp. Supabase is open source and officially supports self-hosting. If vendor lock-in is a concern, you can migrate your entire stack to your own infrastructure. Neon does not offer a self-hosted path.

Gotchas & edge cases

• Supabase Free projects hard-pause after one week of inactivity. This is not a scale-to-zero; a paused project returns an error until you manually resume it in the dashboard. A staging environment that goes untouched over a long weekend can catch you off guard.

• Neon's paid tiers have no flat price because there is no flat price. Invoices are 100% consumption-based. This is an advantage at low usage, but it means you should set Neon's spending limits immediately after upgrading to avoid surprise bills during unexpected traffic spikes.

• Neon's Scale tier charges $0.222/CU-hr versus $0.106/CU-hr on Launch. Scale is not the same rate with more headroom. You pay roughly double per compute unit in exchange for a higher compute ceiling (56 CU / 224 GB RAM), 25 branches, 30-day time travel, private networking, and SLAs.

• HIPAA costs extra on both platforms. Neither Supabase Team ($599/mo) nor Neon Scale includes HIPAA in the base price. Both treat it as an add-on. Budget for this separately before quoting compliance-sensitive customers.

• Read replicas on Supabase require the Team plan ($599/mo). On Neon, read replicas are available starting on the Free tier. If read replicas are critical to your architecture and your budget is not near $600/month, Neon has a clear advantage here.

• Neon Auth caps at 60,000 MAUs on the Free tier and 1M MAUs on Launch. This is a relatively new feature billed separately from compute. If your user base grows quickly, verify the auth pricing before depending on it as your primary auth layer.

Bottom line

Pick Neon if you need a pure Postgres service with genuine pay-per-use economics, a branching workflow that integrates with CI/CD, or you are building multi-tenant infrastructure where many databases sit mostly idle. Pick Supabase if you want a single platform covering auth, storage, and realtime alongside Postgres, value a predictable flat monthly fee at moderate load, or need an open-source self-hostable option as an insurance policy. The real choice is not Postgres quality; both are excellent managed Postgres services. The choice is between a focused database tool and a full backend platform. If you are unsure, Supabase's $25 Pro plan is the safer default for a new product, and you can always extract to a dedicated Postgres service like Neon once your usage patterns are clear enough to make the metered billing work in your favor.