# Neon

> Serverless Postgres with autoscaling, branching and scale-to-zero.

- Category: [Databases](https://freetier.tech/c/database.md)
- Free tier: Always free. 100 projects, each with 100 CU-hours/month, 1 GB storage (20 GB total) and 5 GB egress/month.
- Commercial use not stated
- No card required
- Pricing: https://neon.com/pricing
- Last verified: 2026-10-28

## Free tier limits

- 100 projects
- 100 CU-hours per project per month
- 1 GB Postgres storage per project, 20 GB total across all projects
- 5 GB public network transfer (egress) per project per month
- Autoscaling up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM)
- 10 branches per project
- 6-hour restore window (1 GB limit)
- 1 manual snapshot
- 1 day monitoring retention

## Gotchas

- Compute scales to zero after 5 minutes idle and this can't be disabled on Free; the next query wakes it within a few hundred milliseconds.
- Using up a project's 100 CU-hours or 5 GB egress suspends its compute until the next billing period or an upgrade.
- Exceeding 1 GB in a project (or 20 GB in total) makes inserts, updates and deletes fail until space is freed; data is not deleted.
- Neon says Free should be avoided for production workloads where uninterrupted availability matters.
- The CLI's npm package is now `neon` (Homebrew formula is still `neonctl`); `neon auth` is a legacy alias for `neon login`.

## Setup

### What the human does

1. Sign up at https://neon.com/signup (GitHub or Google sign-in is fastest).
2. Approve the browser prompt from `neon login`, or create an API key in the Console under Account settings > API keys.

### How the agent gets access

#### CLI login

- Install: `npm i -g neon@latest`
- Run: `neon login`
- Notes: Opens a browser for the human to approve; credentials are saved to ~/.config/neon/credentials.json.

#### API key

- Get it at: https://console.neon.tech
- Env var: `NEON_API_KEY`
- Notes: Create under Account settings > API keys; the key is shown only once. The CLI uses it instead of `neon login`.

#### Connection string

- Run: `neon connection-string --pooled`
- Get it at: https://console.neon.tech
- Env var: `DATABASE_URL`
- Notes: Or copy it from the Connect button in the Console; the -pooler host enables connection pooling.

### Verify

```sh
neon me
```

### Optional: start without an account

Creates a temporary resource before the human has an account, for trying things out. The steps above are the normal path.

- Run: `neon claim create --env-pull`
- Expires: Unclaimed projects expire after 72 hours and are capped at 100 MB storage and 1 GB transfer until claimed.
- To keep it: The human runs `neon claim accept`, which opens the claim page (`--no-open` prints the URL instead); each claim code lasts 15 minutes.
- Notes: Writes the connection details to `.env`. Functions, Object Storage and AI Gateway stay unavailable until the project is claimed.

## Docs

- Quickstart: https://neon.com/docs/get-started/with-an-agent
- llms.txt: https://neon.com/llms.txt

## Sources

- https://neon.com/pricing
- https://neon.com/docs/introduction/plans
- https://neon.com/faqs/free-plan-limits-and-quotas
- https://neon.com/docs/changelog/2026-10-02
- https://neon.com/blog/neon-free-plan-1-gb-per-project
- https://neon.com/docs/introduction/scale-to-zero
- https://neon.com/docs/get-started/production-checklist
- https://neon.com/docs/reference/cli-install
- https://neon.com/docs/cli/install.md
- https://neon.com/docs/cli/login.md
- https://neon.com/docs/cli/connection-string.md
- https://neon.com/docs/reference/neon-cli
- https://neon.com/docs/manage/api-keys
- https://neon.com/faqs/find-or-generate-neon-api-keys
- https://neon.com/docs/manage/accounts
- https://neon.com/docs/connect/connect-from-any-app
- https://neon.com/docs/get-started/with-an-agent
- https://neon.com/auth.md
- https://neon.com/terms-of-service
- https://neon.com/llms.txt
- https://neon.com/docs/reference/claimable-neon

JSON: https://freetier.tech/api/v1/services/neon.json