Neon

Neon gives you serverless Postgres that scales to zero when nobody's using it and branches like git. That branching is the killer feature: spin up a full copy of your database for testing or development in seconds, no storage duplication. Rust storage engine, Apache 2.0. The architecture separates compute from storage, so your database can shut down completely when idle and cold-start in under a second. That's real money saved for side projects and staging environments.

Free tier: 0.5 GiB storage, 1 project, 5 compute hours/month on shared compute. Enough for a side project or small app. Launch plan: $19/mo gets 10 GiB storage, 300 compute hours, and branching. Scale plan: $69/mo with 50 GiB and 750 compute hours. Enterprise is custom.

Solo developers: the free tier is generous for anything that isn't hammering the database 24/7. Small teams: the $19/mo Launch plan covers most early-stage products. Medium teams: Scale plan or evaluate self-hosting the open source version. Large teams: compare Neon pricing against RDS or self-hosted Postgres. The branching and autoscaling might justify the premium.

The catch: it's still Postgres, so you get Postgres's strengths and limitations. The serverless cold starts, while fast, add latency to the first query after idle. And the open source version requires serious infrastructure knowledge to self-host. Most people will use the managed service.