Managed Postgres pricing 2026: real bills at 3 sizes

On a small app the database is often the largest line on the bill — bigger than the web server. And unlike compute, managed Postgres pricing comes in wildly different shapes: fixed plans with storage bundled (Heroku, DigitalOcean), instance plus per-GB storage (Render, Fly.io), a platform fee with compute credits (Supabase), or pure metering by the second or CU-hour (Railway, Neon). Headline prices are not comparable, so we priced the same database on all seven providers at three sizes, line by line, from list prices verified on 2026-09-26.

The same database at three sizes

Monthly USD, single region, excluding tax. Hover a price to see its lines, or read the breakdown further down. Green marks the cheapest at each size.

What the table says

• Side projects: use a free tier, but know its catch. Neon Free scales to zero and blocks writes past 0.5GB; Supabase Free pauses a project after a week without activity; Render’s free database is deleted after 30 days. For something that must simply stay up, Heroku Essential-0 ($5) or Railway inside the Hobby $5 minimum are the cheapest paid options.
• Small production: Heroku is still the price leader. Essential-1 at $9 for 10GB is hard to beat, even with Heroku in sustaining-engineering mode (see our Heroku exit guide). It runs on shared resources with a 20-connection cap and no rollback, so the fairer comparison for a real business is DigitalOcean ($15.15, dedicated 1GB node, PITR) or Render ($22). Railway, Neon and Supabase land in a tight $20–26 band.
• At 4GB RAM, Heroku Standard-0 wins again at $50 — 64GB of storage and 4-day rollback included. Railway (~$58) and DigitalOcean ($60.90) follow; Render ($70), Supabase ($80.25) and always-on Neon (~$95) cost more for the same RAM.
• Fly.io looks expensive because it sells something else. Every Fly Managed Postgres plan includes high availability. If you need a standby anyway, compare Fly’s $38 with Heroku Premium-0 ($200) or two DigitalOcean nodes, and it suddenly looks cheap. If you don’t, you are paying for a replica you won’t use. (Fly’s app machines got dearer on 1 October 2026 — what the memory price rise adds.)

Line-by-line breakdown

Metered vs fixed: the idle-time question

Neon and Railway are the only two where the bill moves with actual load. Neon’s Launch plan charges $0.106 per CU-hour, and 1 CU is roughly 4GB of RAM. A 0.25 CU database that is busy 8 hours a day uses 60 CU-hours, about $6.36 of compute; the same database kept warm around the clock is $19.34. That makes Neon the cheapest serious option for internal tools, staging and B2B apps with office-hours traffic — and one of the pricier ones for a busy always-on database. Cold starts after scale-to-zero are the trade-off; the Scale plan lets you set the idle timeout or keep compute always on (at $0.222 per CU-hour).

Railway meters RAM and CPU by the second, so a Postgres that holds 4GB of shared buffers pays for 4GB all month. Its bigger gotcha is plan limits: Hobby volumes stop at 5GB, so any database heading past that belongs on Pro, whose $20 minimum is shared with your app services on the same account.

The do-it-yourself floor

Postgres on your own VPS is the cheapest per gigabyte of RAM by a wide margin. Cheapest plans with at least 4GB RAM in our data set as of 2026-10-05:

The server is the smallest part of the cost. Off-site backups you have actually restored, WAL archiving for point-in-time recovery, major-version upgrades and monitoring are all on you. A managed database at $15–60 a month is mostly an insurance policy against the night your disk fills up. If you already run your app on a VPS (see Hetzner’s 2026 prices and netcup’s G12.5 increase), putting Postgres next to it is reasonable for side projects — less so for anything with paying customers.

How to choose

• Your app already lives on a PaaS: use its database first — private networking and one bill beat a few dollars of savings. Compare the platforms themselves in Render vs Heroku or Railway vs Render.
• Serverless front-end (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare): Neon or Supabase, both with HTTP/pooled connections that suit short-lived functions. See Is Vercel worth it? for the compute side and how Vercel’s Flat Rate CDN tiers work for the CDN side.
• Predictable bill, real dedicated node: DigitalOcean or Render.
• You need a hot standby from day one: Fly.io MPG is the cheapest way to get HA in this list.
• You also want auth, storage and realtime: Supabase’s $25 covers a lot more than the database; judge it as a backend, not only as Postgres.

Methodology: database prices were read from each provider’s official pricing page or docs on 2026-09-26. Usage-billed rows (Railway, Neon) are estimates at the averages shown in each line, over a 30-day month (Railway, per-second rates) or 730 hours (Neon). Storage is the data size stated per column; DigitalOcean plans include their minimum disk in the base price. Database egress is left out because it usually stays on private networking; Neon includes 500GB and Supabase Pro 250GB of egress. VPS rows come from our live data set (2026-10-05). No database provider in this article pays us; DigitalOcean and some VPS providers have affiliate links (disclosed in the footer), which never change the ordering or the numbers.