CockroachDB vs Neon Pricing (2026)

How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.

CockroachDB pricing Neon pricing
Starts at $0/mo Custom
Number of plans 2 3
Free plan —
Free trial —
Pricing model usage-based usage-based

Price is one row. To weigh the features too, use our feature comparison template →

Standard

$0/mo
  • Shared infrastructure
  • 99.99% availability SLA
  • Single- or multi-region, on AWS and GCP
  • Usage-based storage
  • Row-level security, column-level encryption, private connectivity
  • CDC add-on available
  • 1-hour P1 support response

Mission Critical

$0/mo
  • Dedicated infrastructure
  • 99.999% availability SLA with multi-region
  • AWS, GCP and Azure
  • Provisioned storage, or usage-based storage (preview)
  • Egress controls, CMEK, PCI DSS & HIPAA compliance
  • All add-ons available
  • 30-minute P1 support response

Free

$0/mo
  • 100 projects
  • 100 CU-hrs monthly per project
  • 0.5 GB of storage per project
  • Sizes up to 2 CU (8 GB RAM)
  • Unlimited team members
  • Managed Better Auth
  • 5 GB of Object Storage
  • Functions

Launch

Popular
Custom
  • 100 projects
  • $0.106 per CU-hr
  • $0.35 per GB-month
  • Sizes up to 16 CU (64 GB RAM)
  • 3-day metrics/logs in UI
  • Managed Better Auth
  • Object Storage
  • Functions
  • AI Gateway

Scale

Custom
  • 1,000+ projects
  • $0.222 per CU-hr
  • $0.35 per GB-month
  • Sizes up to 56 CU (224 GB RAM)
  • SLAs, HIPAA, private network
  • Managed Better Auth
  • Object Storage
  • Functions
  • AI Gateway

CockroachDB vs Neon FAQ

Which one is cheaper?
One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
Can I use either one for free?
Neon has a free plan. CockroachDB doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
How do they charge?
Both use a usage-based model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
Which one is a better deal?
Depends on what you need. CockroachDB: This isn't a budget play — usage-based vCPU pricing plus a premium Mission Critical tier signals they're chasing teams who need serious distributed-SQL muscle (multi-region, strong consistency) and are willing to pay for it, going head-to-head with Google Spanner and Yugabyte more than commodity Postgres hosting. The lack of a free plan reinforces that they're not fishing for hobbyists. Neon: Neon isn't competing on a low headline price — it's competing on architecture, pitching serverless Postgres with instant branching to teams who'd otherwise run RDS or self-hosted Postgres. The usage-based model makes it cheap to start but hard to benchmark against flat-rate competitors like Supabase, which puts pressure on Neon to prove the 'typical spend' numbers hold up in practice.

Still deciding? See the best CockroachDB alternatives or the best Neon alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.

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