Neon is the Postgres I reach for first. Branches are my favourite feature: a full copy of the database per preview environment, in seconds. With the HTTP driver, a Lambda talks to it with no VPC, no NAT and no RDS Proxy.
Watch item: Databricks bought Neon in 2025. Prices went down since, and it still runs as its own product.
Use it when
- New apps on Lambda, Workers or anything else.
- Preview environments: a database branch per pull request.
- Relational data plus JSONB documents: one Postgres replaces a separate NoSQL store at my clients' scale.
- Semantic search with pgvector next to the data.
Don't use it when
- The client must stay inside AWS for compliance, or wants Bedrock Knowledge Bases on SQL: use Aurora.
Pricing
Launch plan $0.106 per compute-unit hour, Scale $0.222; storage $0.35/GB-month; no minimum. Available in Sydney.
Gotchas, with fixes
Gotcha: The pooled endpoint accepts 10,000 clients, but real concurrent transactions are about 90% of max_connections: roughly 94 at 0.25 CU, 377 at 1 CU. Queued clients time out after 120 s.
Fix: Size compute for concurrent transactions, not client count. Use the HTTP driver for one-shot queries.
Gotcha: The HTTP driver has no interactive transactions.
Fix: Use the WebSocket mode of the serverless driver when you need a session.
Gotcha: After 5 minutes idle, compute scales to zero and the next query waits a few hundred milliseconds.
Fix: Fine for most apps. Disable scale-to-zero on production branches that need instant answers.
Provisioning
Pulumi via a Terraform provider · Community Terraform provider
Terraform provider kislerdm/neon (community; Neon has adopted it as neondatabase/neon, not yet on the registry). Use it from Pulumi with pulumi package add terraform-provider. Pin the version.
Instead, consider
- Aurora PostgreSQL AWS-only clients, compliance, Bedrock Knowledge Bases.
Worked examples
Where it fits
- An API for my app: Pick 02.
Postgres over HTTP, no VPC or proxy needed.
- Something live that many people watch at once: Pick 03.
The record. Finished events are reconciled into Postgres.
- Device and IoT data: Pick 03.
Postgres wins for ingest-and-report.
- A database: Pick 01.
Default. Branches, scale to zero, HTTP driver.
Sources
Last reviewed by Nicolas Dao