PlanetScale 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.
| PlanetScale | Neon | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $5/mo | Custom |
| Number of plans | 2 | 3 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based |
Base Plan
- Single node — Starting at $5/month for development and low-traffic workloads
- Metal — Starting at $50/month with local NVMe storage for high-performance needs
- High Availability — 1 primary + 2 replicas across 3 availability zones
Enterprise
- Database expertise
- Migration assistance
- Slack-based support
- More deployment options
- Business support included
- Architecture consultation
- Custom pricing
- Additional regions
- Bring your own cloud
- Upgraded support
Free
- 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 (Beta)
- Functions (Beta)
Launch
Popular- 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 (Beta)
- Functions (Beta)
- AI Gateway (Beta)
Scale
- 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 (Beta)
- Functions (Beta)
- AI Gateway (Beta)
PlanetScale 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. PlanetScale doesn't — you'll need to pay from day one.
- 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. PlanetScale: PlanetScale sits at the premium end of the managed MySQL/database space — pricier than raw RDS or a self-hosted Vitess cluster, but selling the promise of zero-downtime schema changes and horizontal scaling without an ops team. They're chasing teams who've outgrown vanilla Postgres/MySQL hosting and are willing to pay for database infrastructure that just works at scale. Neon: Neon positions itself as the developer-first alternative to RDS or traditional managed Postgres, betting that serverless scaling and instant branching justify a usage-based model over predictable flat pricing. It's not competing on being the cheapest — it's competing on infrastructure elegance for teams building on Postgres who are tired of provisioning fixed instances.
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