Neon vs Supabase pricing 2026: real Next.js bills

Neon and Supabase are the two Postgres services most Next.js projects on Vercel end up choosing between, and their pricing pages are built so that you cannot compare them at a glance. Neon charges for the hours your database is awake. Supabase charges a $25 platform fee and runs an instance around the clock. Below are both rate cards, the bill for one database at our four standard traffic levels, the point where each becomes the cheaper choice, and the costs that only show up once you add preview branches and a staging project.

The short answer

• Side projects: both free tiers work. Neon’s gives each project 100 CU-hours, about 400awake hours at the smallest size; Supabase’s pauses a project after a week with no activity.
• Small production app (1GB of RAM): Neon is cheaper. $13.03 a month in our startup scenario against Supabase’s $25.00 minimum, and still cheaper if the database never sleeps.
• Always-on databases from 2GB up: Supabase is cheaper. Its instances are priced below the equivalent Neon compute running 24/7 ($77.13 vs $86.13 at 4GB in our e-commerce scenario).
• Lots of signed-in users: Neon Auth includes up to 1M monthly active users on Launch; Supabase includes 100,000 and charges $0.00325 each after that. At 120,000 MAU that flips the high-traffic result back to Neon.
• Many preview branches: Neon branches sleep when nobody opens them; Supabase preview branches run a billed instance for as long as they exist.

The rate cards

Official list prices in USD, excluding tax, checked 2026-10-24. Neon’s Scale plan ($0.222 per CU-hour) adds 30-day history, private networking and compliance features; most apps in this comparison do not need it.

The models are different in one important way. On Supabase the instance is always running, so the bill is the same whether the database answered a million queries or none. On Neon a compute that has had no connections for five minutes suspends and stops billing, and autoscaling bills the size it actually ran at. Your Neon bill therefore depends on how many hours a day your app talks to the database, which is something you can see in Neon’s usage page once the app is live, but have to guess beforehand.

One database at four traffic levels

We gave each of our four traffic scenarios a database: how much data, how much RAM, how many hours a day it is awake, how many users sign in and how much data the queries send back. These are assumptions, chosen to be ordinary for a Next.js app of that size, not measurements. The hosting line is the live Vercel estimate from our data set.

Database totals assume you use each service’s built-in auth for the signed-in users. Our Vercel figure is the plan and CDN transfer only; function compute is extra and is priced in our Fluid compute guide. The hobby row uses Vercel Hobby, which is for non-commercial projects only.

Three results are worth reading slowly. In the startup row the Neon database is awake 14 hours a day, which uses 106CU-hours — just over the free tier’s 100, so it lands on Launch at $13.03. In the e-commerce row both run 4GB around the clock and Supabase’s Medium instance is the cheaper way to buy that RAM ($77.13 vs $86.13). In the high-traffic row Supabase is cheaper before auth ($145.74 vs $175.76, even after $13.50 for the 150GB of egress over its 250GB allowance), but 20,000 sign-ins over the included 100,000 add $65.00, which puts it at $210.74against Neon’s $175.76. If you run auth elsewhere (Clerk, Auth.js, your own tables), compare the before-auth figures; the other three rows stay inside both auth allowances, so they do not change.

Where each one becomes cheaper

The real question is how many hours a day your database is awake. The table pairs each Supabase instance with the Neon compute that has the same RAM, both holding 10GB, and shows how long the Neon database can be awake each day before it costs as much as the always-on Supabase project.

At 1GB, Supabase’s $25 minimum is the whole story: Neon’s smallest compute costs $19.34 a month even if it never sleeps, so Neon stays cheaper until the extra storage catches up — at about 21GB of data, because Neon charges $0.35/GB from the first gigabyte while Supabase includes 8GB and then charges $0.125. From 2GB up, a database that is busy most of the day is cheaper on Supabase, and the larger sizes come with dedicated CPU there. Neon wins back the bigger sizes when the load is uneven: autoscaling between, say, 0.25 and 2 CU bills the average, not the peak, so an app that needs 8GB for two busy hours and 1GB the rest of the day pays nothing like the 24/7 figure.

Preview branches and staging

Vercel builds a preview deployment for every pull request, and many teams give each preview its own database branch. This is where the two models drift furthest apart. Assume 20 pull requests a month, each open 3 days, each preview database actually used for 2 hours in total, plus one staging project that is used 2 hours a day, all at the smallest size:

On Neon this is a rounding error. On Supabase it is more than the whole production database in our startup scenario ($25.00), and branch compute sits outside the spend cap, so a forgotten branch keeps billing. Both services’ Git and Vercel integrations can delete a branch when its pull request closes; turn that on either way. Neon also bills child branches for storage only on the data that changed since the branch was created, so a copy of a 10GB database used for one preview costs close to nothing to keep.

What the totals leave out

• Bundled services. Supabase Pro also includes 100GB of file storage, realtime, edge functions and a REST/GraphQL API generated from your schema. Neon now lists auth, object storage ($0.023/GB-month) and functions on its pricing page as well, but most Next.js teams on Neon still use the database alone. If you would otherwise pay for a separate auth or storage service, add that to the Neon column.
• Backups and restore. Neon’s instant restore keeps 1 day of history by default and bills $0.20/GB-month for the changes it holds — small for a read-heavy app, noticeable for a write-heavy one. Supabase Pro keeps 7 days of daily backups; point-in-time recovery is $100 a month for each 7 days of retention.
• Disk is provisioned, storage is measured. Supabase bills the disk size it has provisioned, which grows ahead of your data; Neon bills the data you actually store, measured hourly. We priced both at the data size, so the Supabase disk line can run a little higher in practice.
• Cold starts. A Neon compute that has scaled to zero takes a moment to wake on the first query. On the Launch plan you can turn scale-to-zero off, which turns the database into an always-on one and moves you to the 24/7 column above.
• Region. Put the database in the same region as your Vercel functions (Washington D.C. iad1 is Vercel’s default). Cross-region queries add latency to every request, and on Vercel every extra millisecond a function waits is billed as provisioned memory.

Which one to pick

• Side project or MVP: start on Neon Free. It does not pause on inactivity and gives 100 projects; Supabase Free is fine too if you want its auth and storage, but a demo that nobody opens for a week will be paused.
• Small production app, traffic mostly in business hours: Neon Launch. At 1GB it undercuts Supabase’s $25 minimum even when always on, and scale-to-zero cuts it further.
• Steady traffic, 4GB or more, busy all day: Supabase Pro, unless you have more than 100,000 signed-in users a month on its auth — then price the MAU line first.
• You want auth, file storage and realtime in one bill: Supabase. That is what the $25 buys, and it is good value if you use it.
• Many developers, many preview environments: Neon. Branches that sleep are the cheapest way to give every pull request its own database.
• Neither: if your app runs on a VPS or a PaaS rather than Vercel, a database next to the app can be cheaper still — see the seven managed Postgres providers compared, and the Vercel vs Railway numbers for running app and database in one place.

Methodology: Neon and Supabase prices are official list prices from neon.com/pricing, neon.com/docs, supabase.com/pricing and supabase.com/docs, checked 2026-10-24, in USD excluding tax. A month is 730 hours. Supabase compute uses the hourly rates from its compute docs (Micro $9.81, Large $110.74 a month). Instances are paired by RAM (1 CU ≈ 4GB); CPU allocation differs. Data size, RAM, awake hours, MAU, egress, preview and staging usage are assumptions, not benchmarks. Neon instant-restore history and Supabase point-in-time recovery are not in the totals. The Vercel column is the live estimate from our data set as of 2026-10-26. Neither Neon nor Supabase pays us a commission, and every link in this article goes to our own pages.