Neon vs PlanetScale
Free tier against scale. One costs nothing while idle, the other shards when one machine stops being enough. Both prices were read from their own pricing pages on 28 August 2026.
Free, then pay per use
From $5/mo
Which should you pick?
Both are managed SQL that behaves as though it were serverless, and the split is a free tier against scale. Neon has a free plan, drops compute to zero and charges no monthly minimum, so an idle side project genuinely costs nothing and months under fifty cents are not billed at all. PlanetScale removed its free tier in 2024 and starts at five dollars, which sounds close until you notice that Metal, the tier people actually want for performance, is fifty. What the money buys is Vitess: horizontal sharding proven at a scale nothing else on this site has reached, and schema changes that apply to a large table without locking it. Neon will not shard. So the question is whether you are going to outgrow a single machine, and the honest answer for most founders is no, not for years. Start on Neon and keep the option open. Choose PlanetScale when you already know sharding is coming, because moving into it later is real work.
Neon and PlanetScale, side by side
| Neon | PlanetScale | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, then pay per use | From $5/mo |
| Free tier | Free plan: 0.5 GB storage per project, 100 compute-hours, 10 branches, up to 100 projects, no card required. | No |
| Free trial | None listed | None listed |
| Plans | 3 | 2 |
| Open source | No | No |
| Engine | Postgres | MySQL on Vitess, and Postgres |
| Free tier | 0.5 GB, 100 compute-hours | None |
| Self-host | Source is Apache 2.0, but not practical to run yourself | No, though Vitess itself is open source |
| Auth and storage built in | No, database only | No, database only |
| Scales to zero | Yes, that is the point | No |
| Portability | Standard Postgres, dump and go | Standard MySQL or Postgres dump |
Rows where both are the same are dimmed, so what is left is the actual difference.
What Neon is good at
- Database branching, so every preview deploy can have its own copy of the data
- Compute scales to zero, so an idle project costs nothing at all
- No monthly minimum on paid plans; months under $0.50 are not billed
Where it falls short
- Owned by Databricks since 2025, so you are betting on somebody else's roadmap for it
- Usage-based billing with no floor is harder to forecast than a flat fee
- The free plan suspends compute for the rest of the month once you hit a limit, rather than slowing down
What PlanetScale is good at
- Horizontal sharding through Vitess, which is proven at a scale nothing else here has reached
- Deploy requests apply schema changes without locking the table
- Postgres as well as MySQL now, so it is no longer a MySQL-only decision
Where it falls short
- No free tier since 2024, so there is nothing to try before you pay
- Metal, the tier people actually want for performance, starts at $50/mo
- Vitess constrains some SQL; foreign keys across shards need thought
Neither of these? All 12 databases tools, compared on what they actually cost.