Drizzle ORM

Your schema is defined in TypeScript, your queries look like SQL, and your IDE catches mistakes before your database does.

Fully free under Apache 2.0. No paid tier, no cloud service. Drizzle Studio (a database GUI) is included. The team runs Drizzle Kit for migrations and schema management, also free. There's nothing to host. It's an npm package. Works with Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, Turso, Neon, PlanetScale, and more. Setup is `npm install drizzle-orm` plus a driver for your database. Migrations are handled by Drizzle Kit.

Solo developers: if you know SQL and use TypeScript, Drizzle feels natural. The type inference is excellent. Change a column type and your app won't compile until you fix every query that touches it. Small to large teams: the SQL-like API means less abstraction to learn and fewer surprises.

The catch: Drizzle is newer than Prisma and the ecosystem is smaller. Fewer tutorials, fewer examples, fewer community plugins. The relational query API (for nested/eager loading) is powerful but has a learning curve. Also, the documentation has gaps that the team is actively filling.